Exhibition Features More Than 100 Works By Artists Inspired By Matisse

The exhibition will showcase over 100 works executed by more than 40 artists influenced by Henri Matisse. It includes works by Thomas P. Anshutz, Ben Benn, Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles, James Daugherty, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, A.B. Frost, Jr, Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, John Marin, Alfred H. Maurer, George Of, Georgia O'Keeffe, Anne Estelle Rice, Morgan Russell, H. Lyman Sayen, Morton Livingston Schamberg, William Schumacher, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Marguerite Zorach, and William Zorach.

Works from museum collections will be featured, including loans from the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College, the High Museum of Atlanta, New Jersey's Montclair Museum, and the New Jersey State Museum among others.

Although it has been acknowledged that Fauvism played an important role in the early Twentieth Century art of this country, no previous study has isolated American Fauvism from the rubric of Post-Impressionism, according to the gallery.

This exhibit will be devoted primarily to the impact of Matisse on the first generation of the American avant-garde and represents the most comprehensive study on this movement ever to be undertaken, the gallery says.

The birth of Fauvism officially took place in Paris on October 18, 1905, at the third exhibition of the Societe du Salon d'Automne. The works of a group of young radical painters were included in the exhibition salons. Their daring use of brilliant, bold colors and disregard for the academic structure of form prompted noted art critic Louis Vauxcelles to comment the work was that of "wild beasts" or "fauves." Eminent writer Andre Gide reacted by immediately labeling it a "wild beast cage." Thus originated the term Fauvism, an appellation which vividly describes the first evolutionary movement in American art of the Twentieth Century.

Most of the original French Fauvist painters in this seminal Salon of 1905 were in their early twenties with the exception of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who at the age of 36, was the oldest and most talented member of the group. With colors that seemed to come straight from the tube, Matisse endowed his bold canvases with balance, purity, and serenity. Not to be confused with parallel art movements such as Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism, the salient tenets which engender Fauvism are the construction of space with bright color, vigorous brushwork, planar configurations, and the simplification of form.

The first important American artist to be directly involved in the Salon d'Automne of 1905 was Alfred H. Mauer (1868-1932), a frequent visitor to the Gertrude and Leo Stein household in Paris. His extraordinary "Fauve Nude" was executed in 1906 shortly after the revolutionary 1905 Salon. This female nude with its brilliant coloration and slashing brushwork is typical of the Fauves and is reminiscent in its painterly handling to Matisse's "Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Line)" created in 1905. This portrait was purchased by Michael and Sarah Stein, who Maurer knew personally through his friendship with Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo. It is postulated that Alfred Maurer was familiar with "The Green Line" by Matisse and that it greatly influenced his nude. "Fauve Nude" is a pivotal work for Maurer as it reveals the artist's unequivocal abandonment of his earlier style of painting in the vein of William Merritt Chase and James Abbott McNeill Whistler for the expressive and primal syntax of Matisse. Considered one of the most significant works in the exhibition, it is a watershed painting by one of the first American artists to effect drastic change in his aesthetic as a result of head-on exposure to Matisse's art.

Another notable work in the exhibition is "Still Life After Matisse" by Morgan Russell (1886-1953). In 1908, Russell met Leo and Gertrude Stein on his second trip to Paris and through them he was introduced to Matisse. Subsequently, he joined the Academie Matisse and was exposed firsthand to this artist's unique freedom of expression and color. "Still Life After Matisse," circa 1909, is an exemplary creation with its intimate assimilation of Fauvist theories. This work displays an exquisite sense of color, as well as a sinuosity which augments the bold, patterned composition of the painting.

Also included is "Landscape with Waterfall," 1911, one of approximately four known Fauve paintings executed by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965). An extremely rare work, it depicts the countryside around Doylestown, Penn., where the artist spent weekends in a farmhouse retreat shared with fellow avant-garde painter Morton Livingston Schamberg. The vivid impastoed paint of this expressive landscape secured its inclusion in the Armory Show of 1913. This stylistic vocabulary would later be replaced by a more Cubist, formalized, and hard-edged style, the result of Sheeler's contact with the Cubist works encountered in the Armory Show.

The reintroduction of the work of expatriate painter Anne Estelle Rice to American art connoisseurship is of singular importance. Arriving in Paris in 1905, Rice quickly synthesized a Fauve-related variant into her pictures. She began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne of 1908 and continued to be a participant until 1913. She was elected a Salon Societaire in 1910 and served on the jury two years later. Rice's interest in Fauve painter Andre Derain is exemplified in the work entitled "Ajaccio, Corse." Her passionate reaction to the Corsican countryside is reflected in the rhythmic form and brilliant, jewel-like patterning of color, which garnered her strong, critical acclaim by both the British and French press.

Hollis Taggart Galleries is working on this project with Dr William H. Gerdts, a scholar of American art and professor of the graduate school of the City University of New York. For the exhibition, Dr Gerdts is writing an in-depth examination of the burgeoning modernism conceived by American artists while in Europe and the transatlantic idiom introduced into the public consciousness -- shedding indoctrinaire attitudes and providing a common direction and continuum for art of the new century. A catalogue with 64 color plates will accompany this scholarly essay. Highlighting the exhibition will be a lecture series held every Thursday during the month of May.