Arriving at the Fondation Louis Vuitton for the spring’s smartly paired double exhibition, visitors immediately separate. The French surge upstairs, where Matisse: The Red Studio, reigns lofty and serene: Paris’s must-see show of the season. Tourists, especially Americans, take the escalator down, to Ellsworth Kelly: Shapes and Colours, an elegant retrospective unpacking 66 years of monochrome painting.
Designed by Frank Gehry, the Vuitton, standing in the Jardin d’Acclimatation children’s park, its curves billowing above the little boating lake and merry-go-rounds, is an ideal meeting of French intellectual playfulness and American chutzpah, and so it is with these two shows.
Both are American imports — Matisse from MoMA, Kelly from the Glenstone Museum. Together, they summarise Modernist painting’s broadest developments: towards abstraction, monumentality, primacy of colour, French influence on America, innovation passing from Paris to New York around the mid-century.
Matisse’s groundbreaking “Red Studio” (1911) entered MoMA in 1949. Depicting his atelier in Issy-les-Moulineaux, Matisse dramatically, riskily altered the composition at the last moment: he overpainted two-thirds of the surface in deep Venetian red, subsuming walls, floor, furniture, banishing perspective, flattening space, rendering furniture as mere outlines while the pictures and sculptures represented within the studio stand out. The abstracting impulse fascinated American postwar artists.
The painting returns to Paris for the first time in 30 years for an exhibition gathering all the surviving works depicted on the canvas, as devised by MoMA in 2022 but slightly altered here because the Vuitton gallery is longer and narrower. It feels intensely, gloriously, like walking into the painting, hemmed in by the 10 objects within it.
The installation brings too an intimate absorption in Matisse’s experiments with simplifying form between 1898 — “Corsica, the Old Mill”, a violet-rose landscape of an olive estate, trees mere green puffs, trunks obscured by coruscating light, painted in pointillist, shimmering dabs, still guided by Impressionism — and 1911: the sculptural bust “Jeanette (IV)”, condensing features and hair into abstract chunks, dislocating the face, bursting with vitality.
Some of the privately owned objects depicted in “The Red Studio” are hardly known: a terracotta “Upright Nude with Arched Back” (1906-07), sensuously moulded, precariously balanced, has never been shown before; “Cyclamen” (1911), an abbreviated painting of a garden table on a rose ground, framed by a curtain of green fronds, has not been displayed since 1965.
But every object here surprises because Matisse renders each one so differently within “The Red Studio” — harmonising, distorting or teasing out their formal implications. Thus he tones down and makes smaller the jaunty Fauvist “Young Sailor II” with mask face, the eyes, cap, jawline and jumper a series of rhythmic curves — a composition so provocative when unveiled in 1906 that he pretended his postman had painted it. But a ceramic plate decorated with a curled-up blue nude is enlarged and the image refined into a sleek arabesque — anticipating the “Blue Nude” gouaches 40 years later.
These disjunctions intrigue. Matisse looks so effortlessly easy; this show lays bare the nuances of judgment and adjustment that in fact he always made.
The most prominent painting within the painting, the pink-lavender “Large Nude”, a pale elongated figure set against swirling floral motifs, isn’t here; Matisse requested it be destroyed after his death (“A painter has no serious enemies like his bad paintings”). Instead the Vuitton shows five studies from various collections for it, in blue ink, pencil, crayon, pastel, increasingly schematised, ultimately abandoned.
So Matisse held back from the brink of pure abstraction in the 1910s — MoMA lends “The Blue Window” (1913), one of the subdued near-monochromes where he came closest. Then in 1948, nearly 80, he painted “Large Red Interior”: the all-over cadmium red as bright, explosive, joyful as in “The Red Studio”, the structure again the paintings within a painting. This was Matisse’s final oil; he subsequently embarked on the Rosary Chapel decorations outside Nice, bringing to fulfilment the conflation of pictorial and actual space in these two red paintings.
With “Kilometer Marker” (1949), a graceful oil/gesso arch based on a French road sign, Kelly’s show begins a year later. He lived in France from 1948 to 1954 and his high-spirited engagement with French painting shines out.
The thin green rectangles and Matissean curvy leaf shapes of “Meschers” (1951), named for a town on the Gironde, were inspired by peering at the river through pine trees, a view reduced to the blue of water and sky, the pine-needle greens. The same year light splintering on water is depicted in “Seine” as hundreds of uneven black and white cubes, an Op Art razzle-dazzle, and the shadows of a handrail falling on a staircase become the zigzagging “La Combe II”, a nine-panel hinged folding screen. “If you can turn off the mind and look at things only with your eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract,” the artist explained.
The pivotal “Tableau Vert” (1952) returns to Paris where it was painted, Kelly recalled, “days after I saw all the large, late paintings of Monet” in Giverny; the mottled blue-greens evoke swaying grasses beneath the lily pond’s surface. This was Kelly’s first monochrome; ever after he worked in blocks of colour, in ever-more monumental paintings which mimic architecture or sculpture, or become it.
“Train Landscape” (1953) recalls a passing view of fields of mustard, lettuce and spinach, but the grid format of joined chromatically contrasting panels also references Le Corbusier’s modular Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, to which Kelly had made a pilgrimage. “Gate” (1959) is a pair of red aluminium panels bowed to meet as an X, like a kiss. The star turn “Yellow Curve” (1990), installed on the floor, casts a sweeping yellow glow to transform an entire room. “Blue Curves” (2014) projects out into space, casting wavering shadows, but retains the flat frontality of monochrome painting; it resonates with Matisse’s undulating “Blue Window” a century before.
An elderly Le Corbusier, shown Kelly’s paintings in the 1960s, muttered that young artists have it easy, but added that “this kind of painting needs the new architecture to go with it”. The pleasure at the Fondation Louis Vuitton is that Kelly gets that architecture. A year before his death, his final commission, in 2014, was for permanent installations in the Vuitton’s auditorium/concert hall: the enormous monochromes “Colored Panels (Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Violet)”, which Kelly thought of as musical notes punctuating the asymmetric space, and the rainbow stage curtain “Spectrum VIII”. Kelly’s strict geometry counters the baroque lyricism of Gehry’s building so perfectly that these works feel essential to it.
On the other hand, Kelly wins and loses from proximity with Matisse. The context dramatises well how his concerns with linear form, saturated hues, painting which evolves towards architecture push forward from French Modernism. But, in the end, bold minimalism and cerebral perceptual games can’t match Matisse’s mystery and emotional resonance.
To September 9, fondationlouisvuitton.fr
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