PIERRE MATISSE
An art dealer in New York

MATISSE MUSEUM

From June 11, 2021 to September 30, 2021

By devoting a major exhibition to Pierre Matisse, the Matisse Museum looks back at the exceptional career of Henri Matisse's youngest son, an art dealer in New York and a key figure in the world of modern art.

For nearly sixty years, the Pierre Matisse Gallery played a considerable role in the defense of French and European modern art in the United States, during a period that shaped the great Private and Institutional American collections. Through more than three hundred exhibitions, a whole generation of European artists has been able to exist on the New York scene and contribute to its dynamism.

Pierre Matisse worked to build notoriety and to enhance the American careers of the great figures of the gallery such as Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and Marc Chagall, to name but a few of the main ones. His action was more aimed at defending singularities than at supporting currents, whether they bear the name of Fauvism, Cubism or Surrealism, or the School of Paris. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the exhibition Pierre Matisse, an art dealer in New York retraces this odyssey through nearly seventy works by twenty-three essential artists of the gallery.

As Balthus says, "he saw things as the son of a painter." The course gives an important place to the catalogs of the gallery which show the genius of Pierre Matisse for these publications, sometimes modest but always inventive. He also reveals the meticulousness and audacity shown by Pierre Matisse for the hangings, as evidenced by the numerous photographs in his exhibitions.

These two strong axes of the course are found in the catalog nourished by a rich iconographic documentation around the publications of the gallery and the installations. The catalogue edited by Bernard Chauveau brings together essays by Serena Bucalo-Mussely, Catherine Dossin, Fabrice Flahutez, Jack Flam, Claudine Grammont, Marianne Jakobi and Johanne Lindskog.

The exhibition benefited from major loans from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation (New York), the Ezra and David Nahmad collection as well as private collections. From the "Pierre Matisse" donation to the French State, of which the National Museum of Modern Art was the beneficiary, are presented 15 masterpieces that the Parisian institution has generously lent to the museum, paving the way for the signing of a multi-year partnership between the City of Nice and the Pompidou Centre.

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