Section of Matisse Chapel Designs Opened at Museum of Modern Art
Written By: Aline B. Louchheim
Two final rooms, containing full-scale designs for the chapel at Vence, France, now are open at the Museum of Modern Arts Matisse exhibition which, at the rate of 2,000 a day, has been visited by 60,000 persons. The delay in exhibiting this section of the French artist’s most recent work was caused first by the dock strike and then by the exigencies of installation.
Matisse, in collaboration with a Dominican architect, Brother L. B. Rayssiguier, designed the entire chapel and all its furnishings and decoration. The basic scheme of the Chapel of the Rosary is of white tile walls, into which Matisse’s strong black line, delineating the Stations of the Cross, St. Dominic and the Virgin, has been baked, and a series of stained-glass windows in which brilliant yellow, Chartres’ blue and a verdant green make fugal patterns on the theme of The Tree of Life.
The exhibition consists of seven full-scale designs in gouache andcut-and-pasted paper—six of these for the nave set into a gallery wall approximately the length of the nave of the chapel and one other of the ricker, wider apse windows.
There also is a cast of the small bronze crucifix, which in the chapel surmounts the great stone altar. Direct and almost suave in its simple curves, this little sculpture has astonishing solemnity. There also are carnival-bright paper patterns for five chasubles, looking, as someone remarked, like giant butterflies. Here, too, are the charcoal drawing and the photograph of the confessional door, a handsome design which, with its suggestion of a multitude of seeing eyes and listening ears, seems to symbolize God’s omnipresence.
Happily, the Museum also is exhibiting color transparencies, for these, far more adequately than any opaque color photographs, give a real sense of the chapel, where the color is splashed by sunlight onto the pristine walls and lies shimmering on their gleaming surfaces. All is clean and light: the mystery of darkness is banished and the chapel becomes a radiant house of worship for the pure in heart. Matisse wrote of it, “...simple colors can act upon the inner feelings with all the more force because they are simple. A the shimmer of its complementaries the shimmer of its complimentaries acts upon the feelings like a sharp blow on a gong.”
There is rapture here, but It Is joyously exclaimed and fully explained. The mood is one of affirmation, not meditation. Matisse sings of the glory of God's creation rather than His mystery.
Sculptures at Schaefer’s
The small terra-cotta sculptures by Marguerite, which are on view at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, are unique. Little egg-headed figures, jointed like wooden artist’s manikins, are put, like actors, within stylized stage-sets to play out such stories as “The Nativity” and “The Descent from the Cross” or to pause in moments of traditional activity at “The Bar” or the “Swimming Hole.” Enigmatically, the faceless little creatures take on specific characterizations. They are charming and appealing, almost always just managing to avoid the “cuteness” of much Wiener Werkstatte objects, to which they are related, by soundness of structural grouping and the solid relationship of the parts.
Violently in contrast at the same gallery are the “compositions in plastic” by Zahara Shatz. Miss Shatz is one of the most gifted and least “tricky” of the sculptors exploring this new and challenging material, and one feels that she has respect for and comprehension of its special properties.
Even in her three-dimensional pieces, she has not tortured the material into untoward shapes, but worked with a logic of form in terms of space, light and movement (for the latter quality is transferred) as the spectator moves and sees, through the material, intricately changing relationships. There also are what might be called “layer-paintings,” where sheets of plastic are kept in planar relation and bits of copper screen and other metallic substances seem embedded within them. Here Miss Shatz’ taste and sensibility come to the fore. Although some of these patiently worked designs seem merely to translate Miro and Klee into moonlit space, most of them are personal and interesting.
Section of Matisse Chapel Designs Opened at Museum of Modern Art
Written By: Aline B. Louchheim
Two final rooms, containing full-scale designs for the chapel at Vence, France, now are open at the Museum of Modern Arts Matisse exhibition which, at the rate of 2,000 a day, has been visited by 60,000 persons. The delay in exhibiting this section of the French artist’s most recent work was caused first by the dock strike and then by the exigencies of installation.
Matisse, in collaboration with a Dominican architect, Brother L. B. Rayssiguier, designed the entire chapel and all its furnishings and decoration. The basic scheme of the Chapel of the Rosary is of white tile walls, into which Matisse’s strong black line, delineating the Stations of the Cross, St. Dominic and the Virgin, has been baked, and a series of stained-glass windows in which brilliant yellow, Chartres’ blue and a verdant green make fugal patterns on the theme of The Tree of Life.
The exhibition consists of seven full-scale designs in gouache andcut-and-pasted paper—six of these for the nave set into a gallery wall approximately the length of the nave of the chapel and one other of the ricker, wider apse windows.
There also is a cast of the small bronze crucifix, which in the chapel surmounts the great stone altar. Direct and almost suave in its simple curves, this little sculpture has astonishing solemnity. There also are carnival-bright paper patterns for five chasubles, looking, as someone remarked, like giant butterflies. Here, too, are the charcoal drawing and the photograph of the confessional door, a handsome design which, with its suggestion of a multitude of seeing eyes and listening ears, seems to symbolize God’s omnipresence.
Happily, the Museum also is exhibiting color transparencies, for these, far more adequately than any opaque color photographs, give a real sense of the chapel, where the color is splashed by sunlight onto the pristine walls and lies shimmering on their gleaming surfaces. All is clean and light: the mystery of darkness is banished and the chapel becomes a radiant house of worship for the pure in heart. Matisse wrote of it, “...simple colors can act upon the inner feelings with all the more force because they are simple. A the shimmer of its complementaries the shimmer of its complimentaries acts upon the feelings like a sharp blow on a gong.”
There is rapture here, but It Is joyously exclaimed and fully explained. The mood is one of affirmation, not meditation. Matisse sings of the glory of God's creation rather than His mystery.
Sculptures at Schaefer’s
The small terra-cotta sculptures by Marguerite, which are on view at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, are unique. Little egg-headed figures, jointed like wooden artist’s manikins, are put, like actors, within stylized stage-sets to play out such stories as “The Nativity” and “The Descent from the Cross” or to pause in moments of traditional activity at “The Bar” or the “Swimming Hole.” Enigmatically, the faceless little creatures take on specific characterizations. They are charming and appealing, almost always just managing to avoid the “cuteness” of much Wiener Werkstatte objects, to which they are related, by soundness of structural grouping and the solid relationship of the parts.
Violently in contrast at the same gallery are the “compositions in plastic” by Zahara Shatz. Miss Shatz is one of the most gifted and least “tricky” of the sculptors exploring this new and challenging material, and one feels that she has respect for and comprehension of its special properties.
Even in her three-dimensional pieces, she has not tortured the material into untoward shapes, but worked with a logic of form in terms of space, light and movement (for the latter quality is transferred) as the spectator moves and sees, through the material, intricately changing relationships. There also are what might be called “layer-paintings,” where sheets of plastic are kept in planar relation and bits of copper screen and other metallic substances seem embedded within them. Here Miss Shatz’ taste and sensibility come to the fore. Although some of these patiently worked designs seem merely to translate Miro and Klee into moonlit space, most of them are personal and interesting.