Matisse's "Nasturtiums With The Painting 'Dance' "

Yesterday artist Jay Rolfe came across a passage in the Matisse biography he's reading which expresses some of my own views about art. The interview Matisse gave which led to these comments was in 1909, 99 years ago! In Matisse The Master, Hilary Spurling tells of Matisse's interview published April 12, 1909 "in which Matisse explained that the invention of photography released painting from any need to copy nature. From now on art was free to condense and synthesize, eliminating surface detail in an attempt to penetrate rather than reproduce reality. He said that the aim of the new art was to 'present emotion as directly as possible and by the simplest means.' "

Today's photo from artist Jay Rolfe is of Henri Matisse's "Nasturtiums With The Painting 'Dance' " from 1912. This is the second version of the painting, and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the biggest tourist attraction in NYC!). "The Dance" painting from 1909 in the background is at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC displayed in a stairwell - which is what it was created for. The other version of "The Dance" was in Moscow in a collector's stairwell, the same collector who bought the first version of this Nasturtiums painting. You can read an interesting commentary on the museum's website at http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/Nasturtiums_with_the_Painting_Dance_Henri_Matisse/ViewObject.aspx?depNm=all&pID=-1&kWd=Matisse&OID=210003511&vW=-1&Pg=1&St=0&StOd=1&vT=1
The first version of Nasturtiums is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and artist Jay Rolfe posted a photo of it from his visit there in his September 7, 2007 post. What the heck, here it is again!

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.