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Exhibition

Chat between…Matisse and Bonnard

September 12, 2023 to January 14, 2024
Chat between…Matisse e Bonnard

The Pinacoteca di Brera hosts Henri Matisse’s masterpiece, Femme au violon from the Musée de L’Orangerie in Paris, which will be exhibited alongside Pierre Bonnard’sPortrait of Marta Bonnard in a special “chat” between two artists who, as visitors will discover, had a special relationship with each other as well as shared pictorial characteristics and themes.

From the Musée de L’Orangerie in Paris-where two Portraits by Modigliani are on loan-a painting by Henri Matisse then arrives in Brera, which, alongside the painting by Pierre Bonnard, is meant to testify to the strong relationship, especially epistolary, established between two masters of the early 20th century avant-garde.

Henri Matisse, Femme au violon
Sinistra, Henri Matisse, Femme au violon, 1921-1922, olio su tela [Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection]; destra, Pierre Bonnard, Ritratto di Marta Bonnard, 1917-1925, olio su tela, dono Emilio e Maria Jesi, 1984 [Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano]

Coming one from the Fauves experience, the other from the Nabis group, Matisse and Bonnard regarded the role of color – luminous, contrasted, pure, intense – as the constituent material of painting-making as fundamental.
Both often deal, as in the paintings in this talk, with the female subject in an interior, using different languages: on the one hand, synthetic compositions of flat, two-dimensional surfaces of great visual immediacy; on the other, a profusion of brushstrokes that make the many elements present vibrate, dilating the boundaries of the canvas.

Matisse’s model and Bonnard’s companion, portrayed posing in a moment of pause – from the musical instrument or over coffee – testify to the centrality of women, the inspirer of images recreated from reality, making them eternal.

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