
Collection Online as of May 16, 2022
(French, 1869-1954)
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 95.6 x 70.8 cm (37 5/8 x 27 7/8 in.)
Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift 2020.111
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
223 20th Century Avant-Garde
Henri Matisse, leader of the French Fauves (“Wild Beasts”), advocated the complete liberation of color from natural appearances and reducing formal elements to absolute essentials. “What I dream of,” he wrote, “is an art of balance, purity, and serenity.” In Tulips a vase of flowers floats mysteriously against fields of thinly applied turquoise, aqua, and lavender. While the colorful tulips express a joyful sentiment, the vase rests precariously on a planar shape, perhaps a tabletop. The uncertainty of the vase’s position as it extends over the edge, and whether the tabletop continues to the right through a plane of transparent color, together with the strange black rectangle in the background, inserts a contravening feeling of disquiet and visual tension into the time-honored genre of still-life painting.