Posted by on Jul 9, 2022 | 22 comments

A post from the past…for Saturday art talks. I’m a bit overwhelmed with art right now!

Well, mama and papa went to see a show of Mr. Matisse’s works and on the first floor of the exhibit, everything was glorious, they said, and Matisse, in the explanations on the wall about his life, chatted interestingly about how he makes color work for him and his love of the oriental patterns in fabrics and how his art is influenced by both of these plus amazing flowered tiles from many different cultures, but then they went to the second floor (this is in the Scuderia in Rome, which was created from elegant stables of a palace, made into a wondrous museum) and Mr. Matisse began to sound a little bit full of himself and a little too analytical about how he paints, when what is touching and lovely about his art is that it appears so freely and easily done, as if he simply whipped it out one morning when he was feeling joyful.

So. Even artists have feet of clay. I happen to love his works of vibrant color, especially the portrait of the Spanish dancer and papa loved a lady sitting behind two vases of flowers, but then Matisse was asked to do costumes for a ballet set to Stravinskij’s music for Le Chant de Rossignol and I think he was a bit out of his league—or he sought to impress, and his trepidations about doing it at all took over his courage to just do lovely, simple, spectacularly beautiful Matisse, even if everyone booed.

 Well, they booed anyway. So to speak. It was not a success, but mama saw part of it in a video at the exhibition, reenacted, and she loved it so she would not have given it a bad review, that’s for sure. Maybe it was a bit ahead of its time. But she says the costumes weren’t really memorable.

Maybe sometimes artists try too hard.

I know that every time I try to hard to impress, I either fall off the couch or slip on the carpet and look like a ninny. Then I nonchalantly take a bath.

Always works.

Maybe Mr. Matisse took a bath after the show. And mama still loves him…