.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Océanie, la mer and its pendant composition, Océanie, le ciel, occupy a critical position in Matisse's late work. Screen-printed linen wall-hangings based upon cut-paper maquettes, the works represent Matisse's earliest use of the paper cut-out—his most important form of artistic expression during his last years—to create mural-sized compositions. The panels are also the first works in Matisse's oeuvre that draw explicitly upon his memories of a 1930 voyage to Tahiti, the iconography of which would become the mainstay of his late cut-outs. John Klein has written, "In the mid-1940s, Matisse's recollection of the exotic nature of Tahiti and his technique of cutting paper to create works of art—two activities apparently unrelated to one another—came together in a broad flow of creativity. From this point forward he employed his Tahitian memories in the service of a new, thoroughgoing decorative spirit in his work. Océanie, le ciel and Océnie, la mer were the first large-scale reformulations of Matisse's impressions of Tahiti (in "Matisse after Tahiti: The Domestication of Exotic Memory," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, 1997, p. 54).
The genesis of the Océanie project dates to early 1946, when the London-based textile printer Zika Ascher approached Matisse about designing a fabric wall-hanging. Matisse did not immediately accept Ascher's offer, but asked him to visit again the next time that he came to Paris. When Ascher returned several months later to the artist's apartment, he found Matisse sitting on his bed, paper and scissors in hand, directing his assistant to pin cut-out shapes directly onto the walls of the room. Two adjacent walls were almost entirely covered with white silhouettes of birds, fish, sponges, coral, and seaweed, which Matisse proposed that Ascher reproduce as a pair of panels.
Ascher faced several obstacles in translating these ephemeral compositions of cut paper into the more durable medium of screen-printed wall-hangings. First, he had to find the right cloth. Matisse worried that the first samples that Ascher sent to him were too fine and would lose their substance. In two letters dated October 1946, the artist stressed the importance of using a stiff cloth and enclosed samples of linen from a fabric supplier in the Breton town of Uzel. Second, Ascher had to duplicate the exact color of the apartment wall-covering, a pale beige that Matisse had chosen because it reminded him of the golden light of the Pacific.
The last problem was to determine an effective method for screen-printing the cut-out shapes onto the linen support. Ascher first attempted to make photographic enlargements for the printing, but he and Matisse were displeased with the results and decided to trace the full composition from the wall instead. The two panels were finally printed in 1948 at the Belfast Silk and Rayon Company, with Ascher overseeing the process. The original cut-paper elements, which had been removed from the wall for use in verifying the details of the silkscreens, were returned to Matisse. They have since been re-mounted and are now housed in the Musée Matisse in the artist's hometown of Le Cateau-Cambrésis.
Matisse was delighted with the final silkscreens, which he described in one of his notebooks as his "very successful white and beige wall-hanging" (quoted in ibid., p. 55). He chose to keep half of the edition for himself and urged Jean Cassou, curator at the Musée national d'Art Moderne, to include the panels in an exhibition that he was organizing for the following year. In an article published in Labyrinthe in 1946, Matisse wrote about the present composition, "This panel, printed on linen—white for the motifs and beige for the background—forms, together with a second panel, a wall tapestry composed during reveries which came fifteen years after a voyage to Oceania. From the first, the enchantments of the sky there, the sea, the fish, and the coral in the lagoons, plunged me into the inaction of total ecstasy. With my eyes wide open I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid. It is only now that these wonders have returned to me, with tenderness and clarity, and have permitted me, with protracted pleasure, to execute these two panels" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., St. Louis, 1977, p. 125).
The genesis of the Océanie project dates to early 1946, when the London-based textile printer Zika Ascher approached Matisse about designing a fabric wall-hanging. Matisse did not immediately accept Ascher's offer, but asked him to visit again the next time that he came to Paris. When Ascher returned several months later to the artist's apartment, he found Matisse sitting on his bed, paper and scissors in hand, directing his assistant to pin cut-out shapes directly onto the walls of the room. Two adjacent walls were almost entirely covered with white silhouettes of birds, fish, sponges, coral, and seaweed, which Matisse proposed that Ascher reproduce as a pair of panels.
Ascher faced several obstacles in translating these ephemeral compositions of cut paper into the more durable medium of screen-printed wall-hangings. First, he had to find the right cloth. Matisse worried that the first samples that Ascher sent to him were too fine and would lose their substance. In two letters dated October 1946, the artist stressed the importance of using a stiff cloth and enclosed samples of linen from a fabric supplier in the Breton town of Uzel. Second, Ascher had to duplicate the exact color of the apartment wall-covering, a pale beige that Matisse had chosen because it reminded him of the golden light of the Pacific.
The last problem was to determine an effective method for screen-printing the cut-out shapes onto the linen support. Ascher first attempted to make photographic enlargements for the printing, but he and Matisse were displeased with the results and decided to trace the full composition from the wall instead. The two panels were finally printed in 1948 at the Belfast Silk and Rayon Company, with Ascher overseeing the process. The original cut-paper elements, which had been removed from the wall for use in verifying the details of the silkscreens, were returned to Matisse. They have since been re-mounted and are now housed in the Musée Matisse in the artist's hometown of Le Cateau-Cambrésis.
Matisse was delighted with the final silkscreens, which he described in one of his notebooks as his "very successful white and beige wall-hanging" (quoted in ibid., p. 55). He chose to keep half of the edition for himself and urged Jean Cassou, curator at the Musée national d'Art Moderne, to include the panels in an exhibition that he was organizing for the following year. In an article published in Labyrinthe in 1946, Matisse wrote about the present composition, "This panel, printed on linen—white for the motifs and beige for the background—forms, together with a second panel, a wall tapestry composed during reveries which came fifteen years after a voyage to Oceania. From the first, the enchantments of the sky there, the sea, the fish, and the coral in the lagoons, plunged me into the inaction of total ecstasy. With my eyes wide open I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid. It is only now that these wonders have returned to me, with tenderness and clarity, and have permitted me, with protracted pleasure, to execute these two panels" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., St. Louis, 1977, p. 125).