January 24 – May 9, 2010
This exhibition examines the poetic interest of one of the greatest French painters of the 20th century, Henri Matisse. In 1930, when Matisse returned to France from an extended vacation to Tahiti, he was invited by the famous French publisher, Albert Skira, to illustrate selected poems by the nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé entitled Poésies. It was the first of several commissions involving poetry and the graphic arts of etching and later lithography. In 1948, the last major commission and collaboration with Skira was Florilége des Amours de Ronsard, an illustrated work consisting of 126 lithographs in sanguine, celebrating the love poems of Pierre Ronsard.
Selected Highlights:
