Article in this morning’s NYT about a show soon to open at MOMA of Matisse’s late paper cut-outs.
Is it totally college-dorm-room of me to love the clarity and ease in them? A sense of having come all the way through struggle.
Writes Holland Cotter of a detail from Two Dancers, from a design for a production by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo:
Puncture marks that dot the slivers are records of the many times each had been pinned, unpinned, repositioned and pinned again. For Matisse, it seems that trial-and-error rawness, some evidence of struggle, validated the work.
Traces of process. Linking Matisse to footpaths formed by the acts of animal and human feet and to the lines of horses and bison laid down once and again on cave walls in the south of his country. We’re never not close to the heart of compost.
the art of compost 