Matisse - a favorite always...

Matisse

My art interests have always been what I call "traditional-modern" (what do I mean by that? go here...).  So today what do I see while looking at online news but a new show of Matisse,
"Evolving Toward Ecstasy, Matisse Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art".  Matisse is one of the true originators of the basic idea of traditional-modern "motif"; the directing of art expression toward what actual human beings, persons, find to be real life.  Such a motif contrasted sharply with about 1500-2000 years of previous christian church-related art, and contrasts also with recent abstract-...-contemporary art directed toward what appear to me to be unimportant and self-aggrandizing "whatever".

From Wikipedia, ...Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. ... Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define ["new art forms"] in the opening decades of the 20th century... a leading figure in modern art. ... Around April 1906 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 12 years younger than Matisse.[11] The two became lifelong friends as well as rivals and are often compared; one key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. ...

He, and earlier impressionists before him, believed in painting from nature; an extended meaning of the motif is the idea of capturing views of "real people" and their world.  To me this is the essence of what I think of as "traditional-modern".

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