MATISSE MÉDITERRANÉE(S)

Description

Matisse was continually fascinated by the Mediterranean, from his first visit to Corsica in 1898 to his uninterrupted visits to Nice between 1917 and 1954, including numerous trips to Algeria, Spain, Italy and, of course, Morocco.

By Matisse's own admission, the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that filled him with wonder, was a determining factor in his work, both in terms of the experimentation with a new language that this environment enabled him to develop and the pictorial tradition to which he was attached; even more so, in the mediation it offered him with the East and ancient cultures.

Indeed, Matisse, who sought to express his personal perception of landscape, had a conceptual relationship with the sea, and with the Mediterranean in particular: a sea made up of spaces that were experienced, felt, dreamt of or fantasised about. This 'machine for manufacturing civilisation', as Paul Valéry (first director of the Mediterranean University Centre created in Nice in 1933) called it, became for the painter the site of intense chromatic and plastic research, the discovery of new motifs. Above all, beyond the obvious and commonplaces, it was 'a very old crossroads' of which Matisse was a witness and a player, where - in the words of Fernand Braudel - 'everything converged [...]'.