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• The Ilyssus of the Parthenon

• Henri Matisse

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• L'Ilyssus du Parthénon, 1908
  Oil on canvas
  24 x 28 3/4 in. (61 x 73 cm.)
  
  The year 1908 was marked by several important transitions for Matisse. In addition to opening a school, to which he devoted a good deal of time and energy over the next few years, he began to attract new collectors (most importantly, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov), and his work became increasingly well known outside of France. By the end of the year, he had published one of the most important artist's statements of the twentieth century, "Notes of a Painter," and had come to be recognized as perhaps the most original and influential artist alive (though this position would be threatened almost immediately by the rise of Cubism). Hilary Spurling has written, "[At Christmas 1908], Matisse was a week short of his fortieth year. For the first time in the two decades since he had become a painter, he could propose a tentative toast to the future. However much abuse he still had to endure at the hands of the press, the public, and the art establishment, he had the support of a small but vigorous band of activists headed by Sarah Stein, Hans Purrmann, and the Molls. He already knew that Shchukin's backing would open the inner doors of his creative energy. Perhaps even more important, he had found in Picasso a rival whose phenomenally swift reactions and implacably demanding eye would challenge him to the limit" (The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, 1869-1908, New York, 1999, p. 422).
  
  L'Ilyssus du Parthénon is part of a group of still-lifes that Matisse painted in this seminal year, in which he developed a new visual language based on strong color harmonies, intensely flattened space, and a tendency toward decorative patterning. The sequence culminated in the monumental Harmonie rouge (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), which was the centerpiece of Matisse's submission to the 1908 Salon d'Automne. In the present canvas, the artist has assembled on a tabletop several lemons, a jug that he had brought back from his trip to Algeria in 1906, and a small-scale plaster cast of a reclining figure from the west pediment of the Parthenon, believed to represent the Greek river god Ilyssus (fig. 1). The painting is particularly close both in style and composition to a still-life from the summer of 1906, Les oignons roses (fig. 2), which Matisse still considered sufficiently important in 1908 that he included it in the Salon d'Automne alongside more recent paintings. Jack Flam has written about Les oignons roses, "The objects are simplified and flattened like those in a child's drawing. They are placed in an abstract space, unrelated to a specific viewpoint, devoid of atmosphere, and without light and shadow. Here, Matisse has employed a simplified, primitivist technique to diminish the sense of actuality and emphasize the symbolic relationships among the objects" ("Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, vol. I, p. 221). In the present painting, the undulating form of the jug echoes that of the reclining statuette (note especially the parallel between the handles of the vessel and the fragmentary arms of the figure, and between the vessel's mouth and the break surface at the sculpture's neck), the vase takes on a decidedly animate role in the compositional drama, shepherding the flock of lemons past the plaster cast. As Matisse instructed his students, "To copy the objects in a still-life is nothing; one must render the emotion they awaken in him. The emotion of the ensemble... the specific character of every object-- modified by its relation to the others... the tear-like quality of this slender fat-bellied vase, the generous volume of this copper must touch you..." (quoted in A.H. Barr, Jr., op. cit., p. 127).

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

The Mother Massed in Her Home in Bohain

Arcueil

Landscape in Collioure

Modesty (L'Italienne)