Henri Matisse - San Francisco Museum of Modern...

Henri Matisse French, 1869–1954

Sarah Stein 1916 Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarah and Michael Stein Memorial Collection, gift of Elise S. Haas

Diebenkorn saw this portrait and many more paintings by Matisse at Sarah Stein’s Palo Alto home in 1943. Stein, a native San Franciscan, had moved to Paris with her husband, Michael, and their young son in 1904. They began to acquire Matisse’s work the following year and quickly became his most passionate early supporters, as well as close personal friends. When they returned from France to the Bay Area in 1935—the year this museum was founded—they brought their substantial collection of modern art with them.

Extended Label @ 80% of VEL size 9 inches wide150 words 21/26 pt

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Matisse/Diebenkorn (Drawings Gallery, Large Extended label, 12 x 9 in)

Richard Diebenkorn American, 1922–1993

Urbana #4 1953 Oil on canvas

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, gift of Julianne Kemper Gilliam

After taking a teaching position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Diebenkorn began to use color more expressively than ever before. In part, the palettes he explored in works such as Urbana #4 may have been reactions against the gray light of his new home. But they were also clearly inspired by his growing experience of Matisse’s paintings and his developing sense of how to apply what he saw in them to his own canvases.


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Studio, Quai Saint-Michel 1916 Oil on canvas

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Diebenkorn first saw this work at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., in 1944. With its somber palette, focus on geometry, and evidence of process, the painting was of foundational importance to the young artist, who once called it “the big one for me.” His own Urbana #4, at left, echoes Studio, Quai Saint-Michel in color and composi-tion. When Diebenkorn shifted to a representational style in 1955, he would also pick up its subject of a model in the studio and its treatment of the relationship between inte-rior and exterior.


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Urbana #6 1953 Oil on canvas

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund

Though abstract in its overall approach, Urbana #6 is also reminiscent of Matisse’s interiors from Paris and Nice. The pale blue rectangle in the upper right may suggest a window, while the red accents evoke the goldfish in the French artist’s Goldfish and Palette, at right. Goldfish and Palette was featured prominently in Matisse’s 1952 retrospective in Los Angeles, and it clearly resonated with Diebenkorn. The bold canvas’s pared-down structure contains elements of both abstraction and representation, and it freely shows the art making process, as changes to color and form remain evident beneath the top layer of paint.


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Urbana #5 (Beach Town) 1953 Oil on canvas

Collection of Joann K. Phillips

Though painted far from an actual beach, Urbana #5 (Beach Town) shares a seaside theme and sense of light with some of Matisse’s canvases from the South of France. Diebenkorn once recalled, “Here I was in the Midwest, and I was pretty unhappy there because of all this ground and hay and stuff around, and then this painting occurred. I don’t know, a suggestion of a street and buildings and perhaps an ocean on the other side of these things kept coming, insisting. . . . I thought, well, this is what I want to paint, so I’m going to paint it.”


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Landscape: Broom 1906 Oil on panel

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Elise S. Haas

Sarah Stein and her husband, Michael, were the original owners of this small but powerful painting. Made in Collioure, a town in the South of France, it displays the energetic brushwork and vibrant palette characteristic of Matisse’s Fauve style. Diebenkorn would have first seen Landscape: Broom during his visit to Sarah Stein’s Palo Alto home in 1943.


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Berkeley #22 1954 Oil on canvas

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Regents Collections Acquisition Program

Berkeley #22 exemplifies the rigorous, thickly executed abstractions Diebenkorn produced in the Bay Area after his return from Illinois. With its mostly blue palette, var-iously shaped patches, and strong horizontal bands, the painting brings Berkeley’s unique quality of light and topography to mind. Yet it also employs a structure and colors seen in a number of Matisse’s landscapes; the stretch of blue at the top of the canvas recalls the high horizon line and sky in the French artist’s Landscape: Broom, on view nearby.


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The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The unusual color scheme and broad bands of paint seen in this abstraction speak directly to Matisse’s Yellow Pottery from Provence, at right, with the composition seemingly rotated 90 degrees. Diebenkorn would have seen that still life in the summer of 1947, when he visited an exhibition of thirty-one works from the collection of sisters Claribel and Etta Cone at The Baltimore Museum of Art. He later included this trip in a list of his most important encounters with Matisse’s work.


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Private collection

The decorative elements in this painting are unusual for the Berkeley series. Diebenkorn filled several blocks of color with polka dots, much like those seen in Matisse’s The Conversation, on display nearby, and even added a black heart. At the upper left, a Matisse-like rectangle of blue appears where one might expect to find a window in an interior with a view.


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Seated Odalisque, Left Knee Bent, Ornamental Background and Checkerboard 1928 Oil on canvas

The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland

Throughout Matisse’s odalisque paintings, ornamental motifs are the dominant visual features. Dense decora-tion on walls and floors and on fabric coverings of chairs and beds nearly subsumes the figure in examples such as this. One of Matisse’s most opulent and pattern-rich canvases from the 1920s, this work offers a precedent for building a composition through interlocking shapes, a strategy Diebenkorn used in several of the Berkeley abstractions on view nearby.


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Chabot Valley 1955 Oil on canvas

Collection of Christopher Diebenkorn

To create this work—one of the first Diebenkorn made in his new representational mode—the artist got into his car and drove around, looking for something to paint. Abstract Expressionism had become, in his words, a

“stylistic straightjacket.” Just as Matisse took his paint box outdoors to work en plein air on Corsican Landscape, at right, Diebenkorn produced Chabot Valley outside. The landscape meant a lot to him, as he kept it close at hand in his various studios and elaborated on the com-position’s basic structure in a number of later works.


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Still Life with Orange Peel 1955 Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Barbara E. Foster

Much like Matisse, who incorporated patterns into still-life compositions such as Lemons on a Pewter Plate, at right, Diebenkorn enlivened this tabletop arrangement with a boldly striped cloth—a portion of one of his child-hood bedspreads. The aqua green of the fabric offsets the vibrant hue of the orange peel and the more muted colors of the other items from his studio, including, per-haps surprisingly, a rotten lemon.


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Still Life with Blue Jug ca. 1900–1903 Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Matilda B. Wilbur in honor of her daughter, Mary W. Thacher

The choice of subject and the modeling of forms to create a sense of volume in this early work by Matisse reflect the influence of his artistic mentor, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Cézanne, who also inspired Diebenkorn, was famous for his still-life compositions, many of which feature solidly rendered pottery and fruit in spare settings. Diebenkorn had an opportunity to see Still Life with Blue Jug on the walls of collector Sarah Stein’s living room when he visited her Palo Alto home in 1943.


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The Pewter Jug 1917 Oil on canvas


The focal point of this ambitious still life is a pewter jug that appears in a number of Matisse’s paintings.

“I have worked all my life before the same objects,” he admitted in 1952. “The object is an actor: a good actor can have a part in ten different plays; an object can play a different role in ten different pictures.” Diebenkorn was similarly inclined to incorporate the same objects into multiple works of art.


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The Blue Window 1913 Oil on canvas

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Here Matisse has completely merged interior and exterior by dissolving the back wall of the room. Diebenkorn prob-ably first saw this painting in New York in the 1940s, when he was a marine stationed on the East Coast, and he cer-tainly saw it at the important Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles in 1952. With its structured vertical and horizon-tal bands, carefully considered arrangement of objects, and cool, immersive palette, this composition resonates with Diebenkorn’s own investigations of interior and exte-rior, still life, and landscape.


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The Blue Eyes 1935 Oil on canvas


The figure in this intimate painting leans into the viewer’s space, supporting her head on her folded arms. Although the pose appears informal and immediate, it was the result of many studies and experiments with the composition. Lydia Delectorskaya was one of Matisse’s favor-ite models and a constant presence in his life during the 1930s—running his studio, interviewing other young women to sit for him, choosing their costumes, and eventually becoming the artist’s companion. She looks particularly contemporary here in her striped tank top.


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Interior, Flowers and Parakeets 1924 Oil on canvas


Interior, Flowers and Parakeets is a portrait of Matisse’s apartment on the place Charles-Félix in Nice, where he lived from 1921 to 1938. The sumptuous interior provides insight into the artist’s taste as a collector of decorative objects—throughout his career Matisse filled his studio with fabrics, rugs, and pottery, and these objets d’art found their way into many of the pictures he painted in Nice. Here a window in the background opens to the out-doors, a recurring theme that appears in Diebenkorn’s work as well.


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Laurette in a Green Robe, Black Background 1916 Oil on canvas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Laurette was one of Matisse’s favorite models in the mid-1910s: he made at least forty paintings that include her. Here his Italian sitter cuts a striking figure in her vivid green robe, resting—perhaps between poses for more elaborate compositions—in a bright purple chair. The serene mood resonates with Diebenkorn’s explorations of quietude and isolation during his representational period, as seen in Coffee, at left.


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View from the Porch 1959 Oil on canvas

Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson

In this carefully composed vista, farmland in the near and middle ground leads to a city in the far distance. The post that rises from the porch and stair railing dramatically bisects the canvas, guiding the viewer’s eye toward the horizon. Diebenkorn often employed this type of vertical framing device—Woman by the Ocean, at right, makes use of the same powerful geometric structure in a more loosely articulated scene that incorporates a figure.


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Girl with Flowered Background 1962 Oil on canvas

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund

Here Diebenkorn points directly to Matisse’s example. From the decorative arabesques at the top of the canvas to the isolated figure lost in thought, this composition succinctly highlights the French artist’s influence while demonstrating the California painter’s own achievements in representation. The sitter is very much of her time—Diebenkorn once described the tennis sweater as “a kind of outrageous thing for the attitude of the figure.”


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Man and Woman in a Large Room 1957 Oil on canvas

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation

This is one of the relatively few paintings by Diebenkorn that contain multiple figures. A man and a woman con-front each other in a dark room, but the tenor of their relationship is ambiguous; the man is seen from behind, and the woman’s facial features are left indistinct. The bright blue sky visible in the windows and the glimpse of landscape seen through the open door echo some of Matisse’s interiors with views, while the skirt conjures the French artist’s unabashed love of stripes, as seen in The Blue Eyes, at right.


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Carmelina 1903 Oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection—Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund

Diebenkorn’s first encounter with this striking early nude was probably through black-and-white reproduction in Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s 1951 Matisse monograph, and he likely saw it firsthand on a trip to Boston in 1960. The model’s bold gaze confronts both the viewer and the artist, who is visible in the mirror behind her, wearing a red shirt. Matisse has also featured the blue earthenware vessel that appears on the table in Still Life with Blue Jug, seen earlier in this exhibition.


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Studio Wall 1963 Oil on canvas

U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Richard and Phyllis Diebenkorn

Here Diebenkorn shows us a view of his East Bay studio complete with his own drawings, and perhaps those of friends, displayed on the back wall. The vacant metal folding chair stands in for the artist, who has left his seat to produce this personal image of his creative workspace. The dark interior is reminiscent of some of Matisse’s studio scenes from the 1910s.


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Ashtray and Doors 1962 Oil on canvas

Estate of the artist

Diebenkorn’s still-life compositions typically feature everyday objects that allow a glimpse into his work environment. There is something especially personal here in his decision to depict the cigarette butts that accumulated daily in his studio. The artist occupied this particular space, with its distinctive red-checkered floor, from 1958 to 1965. It was located behind a bar on Sixty-First Street in Oakland, near the Berkeley border.


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Interior with a Violin 1918 Oil on canvas

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Interior with a Violin reveals Matisse’s interest in capturing aspects of his Nice studio—a chair, a violin, a table, cur-tains, and shuttered windows—with dramatic contrasts of light and dark. Diebenkorn once noted that he was par-ticularly drawn to paintings that the French artist created between 1914 and 1918. Canvases such as this offered him especially productive examples.


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Interior with Doorway 1962 Oil on canvas

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Henry D. Gilpin Fund

Diebenkorn’s response to Matisse is visible throughout this composition—in its pared-down detail, its theme of an interior space with a view to the outdoors, its empha-sis on geometric structure, and the evident reworking of the canvas. Like Matisse, Diebenkorn did not favor fore-ground over background or inside over outside: the little building across the street—perhaps a gas station—is as important to the painting as the unoccupied chair close to the viewer.


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Pansies ca. 1903 Oil on paper mounted on paperboard

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Joan Whitney Payson

In this modern still life the wooden tabletop enters dramatically from the right, with just a few pansies placed in a clear glass at its far edge. Setting this del-icate arrangement in front of decorative wallpaper makes for an even more dynamic composition. In a nod to the grand tradition of still-life painting from previous centuries, Matisse has made reference to the passing of time by depicting some flowers beside the vase, where they will soon wilt from lack of water.


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Notre Dame, a Late Afternoon 1902Oil on paper mounted on canvas

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr.

Diebenkorn knew this dynamic painting of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral from Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s 1951 Matisse monograph, which was his favorite volume on the French artist. To compose his cityscape Matisse simplified the details of the Seine and the surrounding area, concen- trating on the combination of blues and purples that pervaded the late afternoon view from the window of his studio on the quai Saint-Michel.


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Large Still Life 1966 Oil on canvas

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the family of Richard Diebenkorn

Large Still Life was clearly inspired by the Matisse paintings Diebenkorn saw during his 1964 trip to the Soviet Union. The tabletop is tipped up so that it appears to merge with the wall, challenging our sense of space and perspective. The wallpaper, filled with decorative arabesques that dance across the width of the canvas, is juxtaposed with a group of familiar objects from the artist’s studio.


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Window 1967 Oil and graphite on canvas

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, California, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Diebenkorn and anonymous donors

This spare, richly chromatic canvas is one of Diebenkorn’s final representational works. The abstracted landscape seen through a window, complete with wrought iron, evokes paintings by Matisse of similar subject matter—as well as the California artist’s new studio space in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, which fea-tured a row of transom windows along one side. The block of orange at the center seems to echo the shape of the female figure in Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, on view nearby, which Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles in 1966.


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Large Reclining Nude 1935Oil on canvas


Large Reclining Nude was considered a major departure for Matisse upon its completion. Following his decorative odalisques of the 1920s, the painting signaled the artist’s revived interest in geometric structure and experimen-tation with the figure and palette. It was featured on the cover of the catalogue for the 1966 Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles, on view in a case nearby, which was an important resource for Diebenkorn during the latter part of his career.


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Woman with a Hat 1905Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Elise S. Haas

This canvas would certainly have made an impression on the young Diebenkorn when he first saw it at col-lector Sarah Stein’s Palo Alto home in 1943. A daring Fauve masterpiece that shocked Parisian audiences when it was first exhibited, Woman with a Hat features Matisse’s wife, Amélie, who was a hat-maker by trade. In 1967 Diebenkorn made Seated Figure with Hat, on view nearby, which shows his own wife, Phyllis, in front of an energetically applied yellow background. Both art-ists relied on their wives as models and muses, and each composition reflects distinct aspects of its sitter’s time and place.


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Seated Woman 1967 Oil on canvas

Collection of Gretchen and John Berggruen, San Francisco

Diebenkorn’s efforts as a figurative painter culminated in Seated Woman—the largest canvas devoted to this subject that he ever made. The sitter almost completely overtakes the composition, boldly filling it from top to bottom. The artwork includes many elements inspired by Matisse: a languid female form, dynamic rhythms, a richly chromatic palette, and details such as the decora-tive flourish at the right. As in many of his figure paint-ings, Diebenkorn obscured the woman’s facial features, which are visible only as ghostlike traces.


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Nude on Blue Ground 1966 Oil on canvas

Private collection

Produced after Diebenkorn’s transformative trip to the Soviet Union in 1964 and his visit to the Los Angeles Matisse retrospective in 1966, Nude on Blue Ground encapsulates much of what he learned from Matisse’s focused interest in the female form. With the model dramatically filling the canvas from top to bottom and confronting the viewer directly, it is one of the most powerful figurative works that the California artist ever made. Its similarity in composition and pose to Matisse’s more academic Nude Study in Blue, at left, demonstrates how Diebenkorn was able to adapt what he observed in pictures by the French painter to his own, very different ends.


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The Girl with Green Eyes 1908Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Harriet Lane Levy

Diebenkorn knew The Girl with Green Eyes well, having seen it both in person and reproduced in books. The first Matisse painting to take up permanent residence in California, it was exhibited widely on the West Coast, including in the French artist’s 1952 and 1966 Los Angeles retrospectives. As a portrait, the richly chromatic can-vas has obvious connections to Diebenkorn’s figurative work. Perhaps more surprisingly, it offered Diebenkorn a model for how to divide and flatten space in abstrac-tions such as Ocean Park #27, seen nearby.


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Ocean Park #6 1968 Oil on canvas

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith

Forms resembling bodies seem to huddle together across this early Ocean Park work. The association with the human figure is made clearer by the scale of the canvas, which is more than life size. The paint-ing shares affinities with a number of Matisse’s nudes, from the radically direct Nude with a White Scarf, which Diebenkorn likely saw in Copenhagen in 1966, to the abstracted Seated Pink Nude, both on view in this gallery.


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Ocean Park #12 1968 Oil and charcoal on canvas

Private collection

Ocean Park #12 offers a revelatory lens on Diebenkorn’s transition from representation to the geometric abstrac-tion of his Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967. A singular work in the artist’s career, it includes both a clearly articulated view through a window, complete with foliage and a floral sprig, and large panes of vivid color that call to mind some of Matisse’s most experi-mental canvases.


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Two Girls, Red and Green Background 1947Oil on canvas


Part of Matisse’s last, glorious outburst of painting, this small canvas was produced in the French hill town of Vence, where the artist had moved in 1943 to escape the wartime threat of bombardment in coastal Nice. The intricate details of his earlier interiors have been replaced here by a new freedom of brushwork, a renewed interest in abstraction, and a bolder palette. The broad areas of color and shape resonate with compositional strategies seen in Diebenkorn’s late abstractions.


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French Window at Collioure 1914Oil on canvas

Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, donation in lieu of inheritance tax

French Window at Collioure remained important to Diebenkorn years after he first saw it in Matisse’s 1966 retrospective. One of the French artist’s most abstract canvases, its dark central form is framed by luminous planes of color. At one time Matisse included a balcony and view out the window, but he later concealed those details with a wash of black paint. Some have suggested that he might have considered the work unfinished. Whatever Matisse intended, the modernity of French Window at Collioure served as a model to Diebenkorn for the more expansive possibilities of abstraction.


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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Friends of Gerald Nordland

Diebenkorn used multiple layers of thin paint to explore color, light, and structure in his Ocean Park series. He began each piece by deciding whether its overall tone would be warm or cool, as in the example seen here. From there on, it was a journey of trial and error. Work-ing on several large canvases at once, he spent many hours contemplating paintings in progress, looking for the next move as if in a game of chess. The diagonals in the upper right quadrant of Ocean Park #54 evoke the shape of the transom windows in his studio.


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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Charles H. Land Family Foundation Fund purchase

The warm palette of this painting is reminiscent of Matisse’s sun-soaked views of Nice from the 1920s. Diebenkorn focused considerable attention on the thin vertical strip at the left edge of the canvas. His experimentation with color changes and lines that are offset from the rest of the composition lends the illu-sion that there is more to explore beneath the surface.


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Untitled 1980 Acrylic and charcoal on paper

Estate of the artist

Long fascinated with the shapes of clubs and spades used in heraldry, Diebenkorn explored those themes in compositions such as this toward the end of his career. In 1987 he and his wife would purchase a farmhouse in Healdsburg, Sonoma County. Ill health plagued him in his new home, making it too difficult to work with large canvases. He continued to paint—primarily abstractions—on the smaller scale seen here for the rest of his life.


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Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund and The Burnett Foundation

A new focus on the horizontal line within a vertical framework began to emerge in the Ocean Park series at the end of the 1970s—as in this monumental and majestic composition, where broader areas of paint in the lower part of the canvas are juxtaposed with smaller bands of varying dimensions above. The bold color and the relationships between the bands call to mind Matisse’s French Window at Collioure, on view nearby. Traces of Diebenkorn’s careful working process are evident throughout.


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