Miro and Matisse Dancing

#93025     48 X 36″      ac

• Miro: “Woman at Mirror” (1957)
• Matisse: “The Circus” from “Jazz” (1947)

In 1941, Matisse suffered an intestinal ailment and had serious abdominal surgery. After a long convalescence, being bedridden, Matisse developed a new method for his art creation: papies-decoupes, paper cutout “drawing with scissor” as he said. He covered sheets of paper with a uniform color in gouache, them, with one or several colors at hand, cut out the forms and pasted them on the picture’s surface. With this method, Matisse achieved many great monumental works in his late life.The “Circus” was one of the 20 color plates of Jazz painted in pochoir after a series of paper-cutouts that date as early as 1943. Here stylized forms and alphabets play with prime colors enhanced by the black. As Matisse said: “I have to find signs that are related to the quality of my own invention”, and with this new method Matisse fused color-from-sign in one simplified-suggestive-expressive cut.

Among masters of the 20th century, Miro was the mostly related to signs, a language of art of his own, through evolutions in his career. Like ancient inventors of Chinese characters, he formulated his personal vocabulary, a kind of pictograms for his art: stars, birds, cats, men and women, insects, eyes, hands, feet, mouth, nose ….. square, triangle, circle ….. in vivid colors and blacks, primitive yet delicate, childish yet suave, vivid and bold, charm and decorative. It’s astonishing to see, in someway, Matisse and Miro arrived at the same conclusion, and produced similar works, as this new painting “Miro and Matisse Dancing Together” by T. F. Chen who juxtaposed Matisse’s “Circus” on top of Miro’s “Women at Mirror” to reveal the surprising “Convergence” of these two masters.

As Matisse said: “The importance of an artist is to be measured by the number of new signs he has introduced into the language of art”, both Matisse and Miro had brought to Modern Art new signs and new methods.

– T. F. Chen