Enjoying Etta and Claribel's collection

The famous Cone sisters of Baltimore, Claribel and Etta, were persistent visitors to Henri Matisse's French studios, and throughout their lifetimes the wealthy socialites amassed 500 of his paintings, cramming them into adjacent apartments. The Cone collection is now exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Today we looked over much of that amazing collection, along with other Matisse pieces, at a temporary exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was an impressive review of a prolific artist's career, which lasted over 60 years.
Matisse (1869 – 1954) was known for his use of color and his fluid and original draftsmanship. He was a printmaker and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.

Neither of us realized that Matisse lived during our lifetimes, we assumed he was gone by then along with other important classical artists, which proves how little we know of our art history. Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge (Two Girls in a Yellow and Red Interior), among his final works, is an oil on canvas completed in 1947 that caught our eye (photo right) because it was finished the year Stan was born.

Floor to ceiling photo of
Matisse in his quarters.

We loved his use of color, and his roughhouse sculpting, but were particularly drawn to some very simple charcoal lines that somehow captured the essence of complex things we have observed -- like the symetric way the human calf folds back against the thigh muscle while in a certain position.

He also liked to show off the way he did things, leaving behind clues in his work that would otherwise seem sort of incomplete.
It was a very nice way to spend a rainy day.

That's a cut-out of the Great Man himself on the left, as if welcoming visitors to his show. Ironically, in his later life Matisse did a lot of cutouts with colorful paper and scissors. Hmmm. We did that in first grade.