Photo courtesy of the Long Beach Museum of Art.
One of the most important abstract artists in the country, the late Ellsworth Kelly’s (b.1923, d.2015) bold, bright, monochromatic sculptures, shaped canvases and line drawings earned him international acclaim in the 50s.
However, one of his last projects before he passed away in 2015 was not to practice his own art, but to offer an exploration of another artist’s work, that of Henri Matisse (b.1869, d.1954), one of Europe’s most influential modern painters.
Matisse Drawings: Curated by Ellsworth Kelly from The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation Collection will open at the Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA) on June 9 and run through September 3 as the only West Coast venue to show the exhibit on its international tour and as its finale.
Matisse Drawings “provides the unique opportunity to view the work of a modern master through the eyes of one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century,” stated the release.
Organized by the American Federation of Arts, the exhibition shows 45 of Matisse’s original drawings from 1900 to 1950, including sketches and finished pieces, offering a window into his process as an artist.
With Kelly’s presentation of these works, drawings placed in a single row, evenly spaced and housed in off-white mats within pale wooden frames, sans wall labels, viewers scan expect to walk “through an Ellsworth Kelly composition to see Henri Matisse drawings,” Stromberg stated.
“Picasso made me want to paint, but Matisse drawings made me want to draw,” Kelly said during an interview with John Stromberg (reproduced in the exhibition catalogue).
Alongside Matisse’s works, nine of Kelly’s large-scale botanical prints, Suite of Plant Lithographs (1964 -1966), will be on view in a separate gallery, according to the LBMA.
“The plant drawings… are exact observations of the form of the leaf or flower or fruit seen,” Kelly stated in 1969 on his lithograph series, according to the museum. “Nothing is changed or added: no shading, no surface making. They are not an approximation of the thing seen nor are they a personal expression of an abstraction…. My lesson was to see objectively to erase all ‘meaning’ of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.”
Realized in 2014 when Kelly was 91 years old, included in Matisse Drawings are studies of body movements, fully realized renderings, sketches that led to major works, such as The Dance (1931) from the collection of The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. Many of the drawings had never been displayed to the public before the tour.
Overlapping with Matisse Drawings will be Vitality and Verve III: Transforming the Urban Landscape, a second summer exhibition from the LBMA running June 30 through September 9 in curatorial partnership with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects alongside support from POW! WOW! Long Beach.
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This third iteration of the Vitality and Verve series will display new works by artists with strong ties to “the burgeoning New Contemporary Art Movement”, described by Thinkspace co-founder Andrew Hem in 2017 as “art for the people” with “roots firmly planted in illustration, pop culture, comics, street art and graffiti[…].”
Known for its diversity, the largely self-supported and community-driven movement has sustained itself outside of the contained, more exclusionary and “white cube” pillars of contemporary art production since the 90s.
“The evocative potential of representation inspires these artists to draw from popular and countercultural sources – music, illustration, comics, graffiti, design, punk, tattoo culture, hip- hop, skate culture, even drawings from 20th century Modern Painter, Henri Matisse, whom the Museum will be exhibiting simultaneously – while looking to the outside world rather than to the self-referential gestures that have typified the traditional exclusions of contemporary art,” according to the LBMA.
Visit the website here for more details on the exhibitions and their opening receptions on Friday, June 29.
The Long Beach Museum of Art is located at 2300 East Ocean Boulevard.