Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Matisse "Le Bonheur de Vivre"



Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography "Matisse The Master" is really entertaining artist Jay Rolfe. It's hard to appreciate today that Henri Matisse's color, line, and form were at the time considered very, very radical.

Today's photo is a good image of Matisse's "Le Bonheur de Vivre" or "The Joy of Life" painted in 1905-06. Artist Jay Rolfe enjoys seeing the original is the wide stairwell to the second floor of the Barnes Foundation in Merion PA. This painting was painted before cubism started, and before Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907 (which was reputedly painted in part as a response to Matisse's "Le Bonheur de Vivre") which is now at MoMA in NYC.

The second photo is Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" painted in 1907. Here's the link to the painting on MoMA's website. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4609&page_number=17&template_id=1&sort_order=1



That's the latest step of artist Jay Rolfe on his Journey From Starving Artist To 21st Century Picasso. You may view some of Jay Rolfe's Unique Artistic Idea, his Hyper Representational 3-D Shaped Stretched Canvas paintings, on his website at http://www.3dssc.com/. Artist Jay Rolfe uses vibrant color, 3-D, recognizable shape, and huge size to reveal beauty, touch emotion in a positive way, and create an Uplifting Conversation Piece.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Today I saw this painting for the first time at the Barnes. I saw humaneque figures in abstract form anchoring the smaller floating human bodies. The larger figure to the left in the painting is a female form with red shoulder-length hair, you can detect her shoulder, breast cleavage, the curve of her waist and hip...the smaller human figures seem to be strewn across her lap. A second figure is also present but is not as easy to "see". These larger abstract images may represent mythical god and goddesss associated with Arcadia.