Until January 14, the Städel Museum is showing two outstanding protagonists of classical modernism together for the first time in Germany: Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). The focus of the large-scale exhibition is the friendship between the two French painters, which lasted for over 40 years. Both artists worked intensively on the same artistic subjects: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and, in particular, the female nude. On the basis of around 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, the show opens up a dialogue between Matisse and Bonnard, offering new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War.
Now that the extensive loan negotiations have been successfully concluded, the Städel expects to receive top-class exhibits from internationally important collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The selection of works is enriched by numerous photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited the artists on the French Riviera in 1944. A particular highlight of the exhibition is the two paintings that the artists each owned of each other, shown here together for the first time.
Another highlight of the work show is Matisse's 1935 magnum opus, "Large Reclining Nude," on view in Germany for the first time in more than 30 years and on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art. The nude, which has long since become iconic, was a milestone on the artist's path to an aesthetic of highly reduced forms and depicts his studio assistant and also his last important model, Lydia Delectorskaya. It is quite possible that the painting was inspired by Bonnard's compositionally closely related work "Reclining Nude on a White and Blue Checkered Ground", which has been in the Städel Museum's collection since 1988. The juxtaposition of these two paintings was an important impetus in the preparation of the exhibition.
(Source: Städel Museum Frankfurt)
Image: Pierre Bonnard, Reclining Nude on a White and Blue Checkered Ground, c. 1909, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
Further information:
http://www.staedelmuseum.de/en/matisse-bonnard
