Robert Kushner: I Heart Matisse

ROBERT KUSHNER

ROBERT KUSHNER

I MATISSE

The Matisse Line by Peter Eleey

D C M O O R E

G A L L E R Y

Suzani and Sofa, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96 inches

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The Matisse Line P E T E R E L E E Y

the flowers are what i recall

most from the early days of lockdown —

especially the bracing yellow forsythia and the weeping cherry blossoms of those March and April weeks. But the seasonal rhythm that flowers annually rehearse had been interrupted by a sense of profound displacement in time. In a matter of days, many of the routines of our lives suddenly stopped and drew inward, away from the infected world outside, unless employment or “essential” activity demanded otherwise. Some things carried on indoors and shifted to virtual spaces, giving rise to an odd temporal split-screen in which parts of life continued on, unfurling in diminished, altered form alongside all that had been withdrawn and halted. It was reassuring to reach back to the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 , and the experience of others who navigated the devastation of another public health crisis a century ago.1 Amidst the upheaval and fear, history offered comfort, the consolation of finding oneself accompanied by the many unknown who have endured similar things, those who lived through other times of dread and isolation.

Those who have never made art probably don’t consider how much of the life of a studio artist is normally spent alone, indoors. So when Robert Kushner noted at the start of the pandemic that he was “not thinking so much about relevance to the exterior world,” his interior focus may have been remarkable mostly because of the energy required to block out the lamentations of ambulance sirens that pocked the silence enveloping the city during those spring months. 2 Without museums, stores, and friends to see, he instead stepped back into the past to escape the familiarity of his home studio, explaining that he was “following a well-developed mental fantasy” that centered around Henri Matisse:

1.

See Michael Lobel, “Close Contact: Art and the

1918 Flu Pandemic,” Artforum.com (April 2020),

www.artforum.com/slant/michael-lobel-on-art-and-

I work thinking more about being an artist in the 1930 s. I am a Danish (or maybe Finnish, or maybe Swedish) artist who studied at Matisse’s academy in Paris (1907 – 1911) during the heyday of the Parisian avant garde and of Fauvism itself.

the-1918-flu-pandemic-82772.

2.

Robert Kushner, “From the Studio: Robert Kushner,”

DC Moore Gallery, April 10, 2020, www.dcmooregallery.com/news-events/from-the-studio-robert-kushner.

My Red Room , 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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But right after that, I had to go back home to run the family business. But from then till now, over a century, in the dark attic of that old, sturdy family house, I have a studio in the garret. Only one small window. During the dark, cold gray winters, instead of going in the Vilhelm Hammershøi direction of silvery light and cool gray tonality, I summon in my mind the blinding light of the South of France. I remember being a student of the Master, watching him daily in awe, as I am now squeezing the entire world of color onto my palette and then letting it sing on the canvas. In my attic studio, I am carefree, wild, experimental, intoxicated by color harmonies and the sun-drenched tranquility and protection of being in the South of France. Or is it the South of California? The Mediterranean plants, the fruit, the vases, the fabrics... and that is what keeps going on in my head.

Robert Kushner in his studio painting

Pink Table , 2020 , New York City.

Photograph by Blanca Guerrero

The fantasy assumed strikingly literal form. Matisse has long been Kushner’s lodestar, and the influence of “the Master” is pervasive throughout his work. But Kushner had recently begun a series of pictures based upon very close study of certain Matisse still life paintings, resulting in new works that repeat compositions, colors, patterns and sometimes specific details of his subjects. Kushner’s paintings aren’t copies in any traditional sense, but they traffic in a structure, vocabulary and decorative attitude that is so recognizably Matisse that they border on kitsch.

The campiness of Kushner’s description of his project buttresses the air of drag that suffuses them, the feeling that he is dressing up in classic Matissean garb —

Pink Table , 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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not borrowing the late chasubles of Vence, but rather enrobing his pictures in the interiors and still lifes of Matisse’s early decorative period, as well as those of the 1930s that recapitulate themes of pattern and decoration.

Kushner’s paintings lack the provocation of appearing as literal copies, as did Sturtevant’s versions of her contemporaries that she began making in 1964 , the same year that Susan Sontag wrote about “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” in her famous essay on camp.3 Taking up the art of peers including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, Sturtevant sometimes altered the size or medium of her references, but confronted audiences with works that looked markedly similar to her sources. She is perhaps best understood, however, as an artist who adopted style as her medium to enact critical questions about art’s circulation and consumption, and it is useful to consider her “copies” as a kind of costumed performance. 4 This engagement with fashion and style was evident in her first solo show, which featured what she called a 7th Avenue Garment Rack (1965), from which she hung a number of things: her Johns flag, something that looked like an Arman sculpture, and a painted plaster shirt in the manner of Claes Oldenburg, among other works. 5 The Oldenburg shirt made the association with costuming 3.

and dress-up most directly; a critic called her show “Ready-to-wear Art.” 6

Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), in Against

Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus

Though Kushner is recognized now primarily for the floral paintings that he began in the 1980s, the roots of his painting also lie in costuming and performance. The child of a painter and a furrier, he described the rhinestones, feathers, yarn, trimmings and

& Giroux, 1966), p. 280.

4.

For more, see my essay “Dangerous Concealment:

The Art of Sturtevant,” in Eleey, ed., Sturtevant: Double Trouble, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014), pp. 47-78.

fabric that he found around his family’s Pasadena home as the inspiration for early 5. The

full title of the work is 7th Avenue Garment Rack

sculptural installations and works that took the form of garments, displayed in per-

with Warhol Flowers.

formances staged as fashion shows. 7 “While many of my colleagues [in the art world]

6.

Lil Picard, “From ABC to Camp Art,” Das Kunstwerk

19, nos. 5–6 (1965): 58; cited in Bruce Hainley, Under

moved in the direction of tar and dirt,” Kushner said in 2001, “I plunged into my mem-

the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), p. 62.

ories of childhood treasures, and these became the materials of my costumes.”

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Taking exception from the macho ethos he found in the Land Art of artists like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson — whose first proposed earthwork was Tar Pool and

Gravel Pit (1966) — Kushner instead flounced down makeshift runways with friends 9

modeling clothes they had collaboratively made out of food. Equal parts silliness and

On Kushner’s early work, see Catherine Morris and

Dara Meyers-Kingsley, “Off the Wall: The Development of Robert Kushner’s Fashion and Performance Art, 1970-1976,” Fashion Theory 5, no. 3 (2001).

8.

Kushner, in Morris and Meyers-Kingsley, p: 317.

9.

His first food costumes were presented in Corona

del Mar as Costumes Constructed and Eaten, Jack Glenn

seduction, these edible garment events were designed to chide what Kushner felt

Gallery, June 28, 1972. Later that year in New York, he

to be the self-seriousness sterility of both contemporary art and fashion. “Those

reprised the project in a loft performance Bob Kushner

who had expected something sexually titillating were treated to inventive humor and

association with The Kitchen, December 10, 1972.

and Friends Eat their Clothes, Acme Productions in

gentle eros in a format that poked fun at artistic pretension,” an audience member

10. Alexandra

Anderson-Spivy, Robert Kushner:

Gardens of Earthly Delight (New York: Hudson Hills

recalled, “while it simultaneously parodied and celebrated the creativity of fashion.” 10

Press, 1997), p. 21.

Daffodils and Dupatta , 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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Performance still of Persian Line I , 1975 , The Kitchen, New York City.

Kushner cites the designers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Paul Poiret among his greatest influences, and he continued to make use of the garment and the fashion show format for a number of subsequent exhibitions.11 After seeing Diana Vreeland’s survey of Balenciaga at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute (1973), Kushner undertook an homage to the Spanish couturier that he titled The Winter

and Spring Lines (1973). Additional shows — or, shall we say, seasons — featured a millinery range presented as The New York Hat Line (1975), and three presentations of The Persian Line (1975–76), for which the artist mixed painted and found fabrics in silhouettes that recalled the chadors that he had encountered women wearing in Iran during a trip he took there in 1974.12 Significantly, Kushner hung the painting-costumes of The Persian Line on the walls of the gallery. As part of the show, he had the performers take the costumes down to dress themselves, and return them to the walls afterwards — realizing a different version of the “ready-to-wear art” alluded to by the critic of Sturtevant’s exhibition a decade earlier. “I liked the idea,”

11.

Morris and Meyers-Kingsley, p: 325.

12.

The New York Hat Line was first performed at The

Clocktower. The Persian Line premiered at The Kitchen

he explained, “that this painting, which hung on the wall and had its own internal

(1975); it was presented again at Holly Solomon Gallery (1976) and in Berlin later that year as part of SoHo:

order, could come off the wall and become a swirling, moving form.” 13 In some sense, these “lines” were Kushner’s copies of Balenciaga and Poiret,

Downtown Manhattan, a cooperation of the Akademie der Künst and the Berliner Festwochen, organized by René Block. The Berlin performance was a duet

for which he mixed his own painting in with low-brow fabrics and references to

between Kushner and Ellen Saltonstall.

garments and decorations of other cultures that attracted him. Fashion would con-

13.

Kushner, “The Persian Line,” Eddy: About Dance,

No. 10 (Summer 1978): 59; cited in Morris and Meyers-

tinue to be a touchstone for Kushner and a number of the artists with whom he

Kingsley, p: 327.

Still Life With Mango , 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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Pink Studio, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 36 inches

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Birthday Party Steuben Vase and Oranges, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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associated as the Pattern & Decoration movement, and it often invited ridicule. “The stock of Bloomingdales and Fiorucci somehow found its way to Soho and 57th Street while we weren’t looking,” one reviewer derisively remarked in 1980, “and is now taking up a lot of serious gallery space.” 14 But it is easy to imagine Kushner enjoying the comparison to Fiorucci, the Milanese garmento who brought stretch jeans and fun prints to the masses, and was later memorialized for having “injected fashion retailing with humor and kitsch and madness, but always in a knowing, sophisticated way.”15 A similar dance between seriousness and frivolity courses throughout Kushner’s work, and he has always charted a path for his artmaking that is unrepentantly guided by pleasure, embraced with particular verve when it conflicts with prevailing orthodoxy. When Harald Szeemann wrote that “he alone has catalogued the criteria for a good Pattern image,” the Swiss curator was describing the formal characteristics of Kushner’s 1970s paintings: “the open-ended visual frame, the absence of complex and iconographic situations, and particular attentiveness to what is happening on the margins.” But an attentiveness also to the margins of taste and relevance has long been part of the artist’s practice.16 Alexandra Anderson-Spivy described his “exuberant advocacy of bad taste” as one of his “most successful tactics,” which would be a true summary if this advocacy were in any way strategic, rather than sincere.17 Some of Kushner’s best paintings, for example, happily flirt with the saccharine tropical palettes of Miami Beach hotel lobbies, or joyously recall 1950s American Chinoiserie and 1980s sentimental So-Cal surfwear amid compositions reverentially taken from Japanese screen painting and motifs borrowed from Central Asian suzanis. His beloved gilded and glittered embellishments carry a flash of risk, in part because they garnish a typically modernist pictorial structure that connotes sober earnestness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kushner’s source

14.

Corinne Robins, “Late Decorative: Art, Artifact and

Erzatz,” Arts 35 (September 1980): 150.

material for his new pictures runs from the popular to the fancy, extending beyond the 15.

images in his museum catalogs to a collection of Matisse calendars, and in one case, to a still life that was owned by a friend, which has never been reproduced.

It is funny to think of Matisse through the seasonal frame of cheap wall calendars— a Fauvist landscape for spring, perhaps, a classic interior for fall, a late cut-out

Simon Doonan, in Stephanie Eckardt,“Remembering

Elio Fiorucci, Italian Designer Who Loved ’70s Americana,” The Cut, July 20, 2015. www.thecut.com/2015/07/ remembering-elio-fiorucci-italian-designer.html.

16.

Harald Szeemann, “Retrogression and Progression

Towards the ‘Dignity of the Decorative’,” (A Selective Summary of the Contents) Du –Die Kunstzeitschrift, 39,

for winter— but it helps to see how Kushner’s Matisse series operates in relation to

no. 6 (June 1979): n.p.; reprinted in Manuela Ammer

both the seasonal fashions of his early work and the perennial cycle of flowers that

ment as Promise, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther Konig,

and Esther Boehle, eds., Pattern and Decoration: Orna-

has structured his art since the 1980s. It is also funny to revisit Norman Bryson’s

2018), p. 61.

17. Anderson-Spivy, p.

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deeply misguided belittling of Matisse in the late 1980s, when he asserted that the 18.

French master would be “given only a minor place in the history of modern art.” 18

Norman Bryson, “Signs of the Good Life,” Times

Literary Supplement (March 27, 1987): 328.

Still Life with Three Vases VI, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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Dismissing some of the very qualities that would account for his enduring popularity, Bryson wrote that “he will increasingly be seen as a decorator and hedonist”— traits that Kushner prizes. But it is nevertheless hard to find many other artists today who are so enthusiastically working with Matisse’s example. While repeating his pictures may not qualify as bad taste, Matisse’s still lifes and interiors nevertheless appear, at first, as a costume of marginal contemporary relevance.

What does it mean to be dressing in Matisse today? How do these pictures differ from the kind of copying that Kushner studied with the Chinese-American literati painter Arnold Chang, who makes refined landscapes using classically-styled Chinese iconography and brushwork? For one, these are subtly autobiographical undertakings. Kushner replaced Matisse’s vessels with objects of personal significance, staging vases and bowls acquired or given to him by friends over more than four decades. Much as he had “plunged into [his] memories of childhood treasures” to make his early costumes, he turned melancholically during this period to things collected from years of travels and friendships: among them, a Delft vase from his mentor, critic Amy Goldin, and a 1980 vase made collaboratively by artist friends Betty Woodman and Joyce Kozloff.

For his first get up, Kushner used Goldfish (1912), but the fish are nowhere to be found. Pink Table (2020) [p .7] instead deploys a coral rose in the glass bowl, converting the central living subject of the original to a cut flower; the rest of the featured plants are assumed to be alive, as they are in Matisse’s picture. John Elderfield

LEFT:

Henri Matisse. Goldfish , 1912 . Oil on

canvas, 55 1⁄ 8 x 37 3⁄ 8 inches.

Collection of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia. © 2021, Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

RIGHT:

Henri Matisse. Cowslips, Blue and

Rose Fabric , 1911 . Oil on canvas, 31 7⁄ 8 x 24 3⁄ 4 inches.

Private Collection. © 2021, Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Tray of Oranges and Taisho Kimono, 2021. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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Grand Odalisque with Batik Kantha, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96 inches

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reads Matisse’s goldfish bowls as “containers” that allegorize his painting —“how things put into a graspable container, and therefore exemplary of touch, are there displayed to the eye”— and, more obliquely, the body, “which is also a container.” 19 The fabrics and clothing that Matisse loved, of course, served a similar purpose, and Elderfield noted later works that suggest a direct relationship between the making of a painting and a costume. 20

Henri Matisse. Red Room (Harmony in Red) , 1908 . Oil on canvas, 70 7⁄ 8 x 86 5⁄ 8 inches.

Image is used from www.hermitagemuseum.org, courtesy of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. © 2021, Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Next came Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1908), from which Kushner borrowed the central fruit bowl, placing it before a wall ornamented with his crisp version of the distorted textile that structures the original. 21 Drawing from his experience as a textile restorer, Kushner reconstructed the pattern and basket motif from a close study of Harmony alongside Vase, Bottle and Fruit (ca. 1906) and Still Life with Blue

Tablecloth (1909), which both feature the fabric. My Red Room (2020) [p . 5] juxtaposes this pattern with the view of the garden outside, shrunken to preserve the important relationship between the lemons on the trees beyond and those on the table close by. But that landscape no longer suggests an actual exterior space.

Rather it arrives almost as a readymade Matisse, framed and hung on the wall.

19. “In Woman

in Blue [1937], for example, the very

construction of a costume and a painting are offered as analogous.” John Elderfield, “Describing Matisse,” in

An “actual” landscape painting appears in the background of Daffodils and

Dupatta (2020) [p . 9], but Kushner substitutes the small canvas that features in

Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, exh. cat.

(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 25.

20.

Ibid., p. 43.

Matisse’s Cowslips, Blue and Rose Fabric (1911) with a similar picture that he 21. This

sketched in the manner of Robert De Niro, Sr. As in others of the Matisse series,

work is sometimes referred to as Harmony in

Red/La desserte, or Red Room (Harmony in Red).

Large Bouquet Basket , 2020. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

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the titular flowers are used as a minor pictorial device, and Kushner directs most of our attention to the designs of the Indian scarf and the porcelain vase. The flowers, fruits and vegetables that appear throughout the series, in fact, feel slightly odd.

Thrown into relief by their Matissean surroundings, they appear almost as quotations from “Robert Kushner” paintings of the 1990 s and 2000 s, much as the textiles that feature in works like Tray of Oranges and Taisho Kimono (2021) [ p . 17] and Pink

Studio (2021) [p. 12] recall the audacious use of painted pattern in his unstretched works of the late 1970s and ’ 80s. Perhaps tellingly, there is no gold or glitter here. The artist, it seems, is embellishing his Matissean apparel with patches of his own work, costuming himself in aspects of his past. In this sense, Matisse serves as a kind of decoy, a highly recognizable container that provides space for private reflection.

Pattern arrives from repetition, and as Amy Goldin reminded us, that alone poses risks to the repeated subject. 22 “Pattern vitiates the impact of form and turns thought into ritual,” she summarized, and Kushner’s repetitions of Matisse embrace the familiarity of the modern master’s compositions and decorative devices to cloak a kind of personal ritual. 23 It is tempting to read Kushner’s series not simply as the latest chapter in his long-running fascination with pattern within the picture plane, but rather as an engagement with historiographic structures and the larger patterns of influence and inheritance that weave through art history over time.

Robert Kushner. Thousand Flower Elegy , 2001–02. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 216 inches

Returning to the question of “relevance to the exterior world” after the paintings left his studio, Kushner cited the backdrop of the “strange, divisive, frightening times we are living though.” 24 This wasn’t the first time unsettling current events had surfaced in his work. Most directly, after 9/11 he made a large memorial work titled Thousand Flower Elegy , in which he painted flora scattered across a viscous backdrop that evokes the pours of Morris Louis’s Veil series (1954–59). The work

22.

See Amy Goldin, “Patterns, Grids, and Painting,”

Artforum 14, no. 1 (September 1975): 50 –54.

anxiously combines an aerial perspective with the downward flow of paint in a com-

23.

Goldin,“Patterns,” 51.

position that straightforwardly suggests the collapse and dissolution of the towers.

24.

Kushner, email to the author, March 6, 2021.

Inside/Outside , 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

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White Night Lilac, 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 36 inches

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August, 2020. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

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A similar pool of dissolving color appears in Dead Tulip (1989), a darkly beautiful picture that Kushner made more than a decade prior in memory of artist Scott Burton, who had recently died of complications from AIDS. The ravages of that pandemic appear in other works from this period, including the figurative pictures Avenging Angel and

Moment of Death (both 1988). Amid the enforced isolation and death of this pandemic, however, the banalities of domestic interiors take on a new charge, as does the vulnerable beauty of flowers.25 And it is hard to think of a time in recent memory where the suspended stillness of a still life had more relevance to life as we know it.

Robert Kushner. Dead Tulip , 1989 . Oil, glitter, and gold leaf on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

In his last years, Matisse found himself largely confined to bed. The infirmities of this later period gave rise to his remarkable paper cut-outs, which he could realize with a simple pair of scissors. A series of boldly colored cut-outs were published as Jazz (1947), and it remains the best example of his artist books. Shortly before commenc-

ing the Jazz pictures— which he started during the war, around the same age Kushner

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Other artists found flowers to be a relevant subject

during the pandemic. See, for example, Nan Goldin’s photograph of fading blossoms in her apartment 1st days in quarantine, Brooklyn, NY (2020) and Amy Sillman’s

is now— Matisse also began work on a lesser-known volume, illustrating in colored crayon the lyrical 15th-century poetry of Charles de Valois, Duke of Orléans. The book has nothing like the audacious color blocks or energy of Jazz . Instead, it is primarily composed of decorative frames, flourishes and fleurs-de-lis that Matisse drew around the poems in the manner of an illuminated manuscript. It is a book of lines, really—

series of flower paintings included in her exhibition Twice Removed, Gladstone Gallery, New York, September 30 – November 14, 2020.

26. The

book’s colophon specifically notes that Matisse

had copied out the poems in his own hand and alludes to illuminated manuscripts — écrit à la main et enluminé.

Matisse completed most of the book in 1943 during the war, but only finally decided to publish it in late 1947;

including the lines of the poems themselves, which Matisse wrote out by hand. 26

Tériade eventually printed it in early 1950.

Three Dutch Iris, 2020. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

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We might think of Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950) as an example of Matisse’s own kind of costume performance, motivated by his desire to reenact an aspect of an artist whose work he admired, albeit in a new form that he could accompany.

Why late medieval court poetry? The Duke wrote much of his work during a quarter-century spent imprisoned abroad, and it has been suggested that Matisse chose an incarcerated historical figure to reassert French culture during the difficult period of Nazi occupation. 27 But it is just as easy to imagine that he was drawn to decorate the work of someone else who produced a prominent body of art under conditions of isolation, confinement and war. Writing of Matisse’s book as the end of the German occupation loomed tantalizingly in sight, the journalist and critic Albert Flamant noted how “in our present days of mourning, the renowned artist, copying 27.

these poems and framing them with elegant and light arabesques, escaped from his forced confinement, to abandon himself again to the intoxication of living.” 28 Forty years ago, Kushner unapologetically remarked that “decoration is affir-

See Kathryn Brown, “Influence as Appropriation of

the Creative Gesture: Henri Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans,” in Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Ana de Medeiros, eds., Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 84. Medieval poetry also would have been an

mative rather than challenging.” 29 Trying to summarize the motivations behind his

acceptable subject to the Vichy regime then in power.

See Rodney T. Swan, “Cultural Resistance in Henri

Matisse line, he more recently described how the paintings provided him with “a different way to answer fear.”

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He then elaborated obliquely, complicating his old

formulation: “Affirmation is too simple a term. But it is close.” In sympathetic affinities stretched across decades and centuries, Kushner and Matisse each found an affirming guise in which to fantastically evade the grief and terror of war and pan-

Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans,” Visual Resources 36, no. 1 (2020): 21–42.

28.

Albert Flamant, “Le Sourire d’Henri Matisse,”

Revue des Deux Mondes 81, no. 3 ( July 1–15, 1944): 303.

Author’s translation.

29 .

Kushner, in Janet Kardon, The Decorative Impulse,

exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art,

demic. To abandon himself again to the intoxication of living, Kushner costumed

University of Pennsylvania, 1979), p. 23.

himself in the paintings of a man who also created costumes for the stage. As it

30.

happens, Matisse’s first designs were realized at Paul Poiret’s atelier in late 1919 as the influenza pandemic wound down; they included a mourner’s cloak and a dress

Kushner, email to the author, March 6, 2021.

31. These

were part of Matisse’s designs for the Ballets

Russes production of Igor Stravinsky’s Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) with choreography by Léonide Massine, mounted in February

for the figure of Death.31 Here they are again, surprisingly ready to wear.

1920 at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra in Paris.

P E T E R E L E E Y is a curator and writer. He most recently served as the Chief

Curator of M o MA PS 1 in New York, where he organized more than 40 exhibitions over a decade at the museum (2010–20), and Visual Arts Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2007–10). With Eva Respini, he is preparing the first survey of Deana Lawson, which will open at ICA/ Boston in fall 2021.

Dahlias and Cosmos October, 2021. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

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D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y 535 West 22 Street

New York New York 10011

d c m o o re g a l l e r y.c o m 212. 2 47. 2111

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Robert Kushner: I

Matisse

DC Moore Gallery, May 6 – June 19, 2021

© DC Moore Gallery, 2021

The Matisse Line © Peter Eleey, 2021 isbn: 978-0-9993167-3-3

catalogue manager: Edward DeLuca design: Joseph Guglietti

printing: Brilliant photog raphy: © Steven Bates

cover: Suzani and Sofa, 2021 (detail)

Oil and acrylic on canvas. 48 x 96 inches

One Red Anemone, 2020. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 36 inches

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D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

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D C M O O R E G A L L E RY