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During the early years of the new century, as the Cubists were revolutionizing art
with their monochromatic, fractured forms, Matisse continued to favour the
voluptuous shapes and intense colour of such early masterpieces as his Dance. But
by 1912-13 he began to integrate Cubist structure into works such as The Blue
Window, one of his loveliest paintings. In The Blue Window three strong verticals
and a single horizontal bar hold in place a series of floating objects located both
inside and outside the room. These buoyant organic shapes conceal the rigidity of
the scaffolding.
The subject originated in Matisse's bedroom at his home in Issy-les-Moulineaux. On
a mantel below a large window one sees a vase of flowers, a sculpted head, a plate,
a lamp, and perhaps a mirror framed in red. To the left a green vase looks as if it
were part of the still life on the mantel but is actually tethered to the wall. The objects
are oddly generic. Though the blue article on the yellow plate
is probably Madame Matisse's brooch and the golden hend may be a copy of an
Iberian sculpture, which Matisse saw in the Louvre, they have none of what Matisse
called the unsettling quality of excessive detail. Caught in their somewhat shapeless
outlines, deprived of shading, and some tipped up, they seem pinned like so many
cutouts to a wall. Shape and colour triumph over individuality, even overcoming the
peculiar inclusion of a sculpture among the personal items. A tree and a bush,
similarly simplified, inflate into balloon-like forms outside the window. They all but
hide Matisse's studio. Above its roof and glazed yellow gable hangs a moon. I
Matisse further obscures the spatial logic through a device called "passage',
invented by Cézanne, whereby the world within and the world without slide between
the bars of the window. The vase of flowers merges with a floral bush; the tree trunk
fuses with a window mullion; the design on a green vase is actually three black hat
pins stuck on a pin cushion, as Alfred Barr suggested long ago. By making mantel,
wall, plants, shed and sky, and the very air itself, blue, Matisse joins the exterior with
the interior so completely that one can imagine the whole canvas as a single
windowpane framed by the stretcher bars.
The timeless monumentality of the painting is party achieved by the simplicity of its
geometry and fully by the choice of colours. Matisse increased the chromatic
balance by adding to the blue the two remaining primaries: a touch of red flower and
a number of rounded yellow forms. The meaning of a work, Matisse believed,
resided in the sensation conveyed by its colour. Ultimately it is the overwhelming,
pulsating, soft blue atmosphere that gives the work its otherworldly serenity. For man
blue conjures up an image of the sky or heaven -an infinite, luminous, distant realm.
So it was in the of Ravenna, the windows of Chartres, or the skies of van Gogh.
There is about The Blue Window a spiritual that has nothing to do with its subject bu
union of its harmonic construction and its hin heavens in its blueness and its radiant
golden globes
Mavi Pencere
Yeni yüzyılın ilk yıllarında, Kübistler sanatı tek renkli, kırkık formlarıyla
devrimcileştirirken Matisse şehvetli şekilleri ve dans gibi erken sanat eserlerinin yoğun
renkleri desteklemeye devam etti. Fakat 1912-13'teki en güzel tablolarından biri olan Mavi
Pencere gibi Kübist yapıyı çalışmalarına dahil etmeye başladı. Mavi Pencere'de üç keskin
dikey ve tek bir yatay çizgi yerinde tutularak odanın içinde ve dışında bir dizi yüzer nesne
yerleştirilmiştir. Bu yüzen organik şekiller, iskelenin sertliğini gizler.