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ACADÉMIE MATISSE
HENRI MATISSE AND HIS NORDIC & AMERICAN PUPILS

OCTOBER 17 - NOVEMBER 17, 2001

biographical information on artists in the exhibition

 

Patrick Henry Bruce Still Life c.1919,
oil on canvas, 23¾ x 28¾ inches,
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College,
State University of New York, gift of Roy R. Neuberger.

 

 

Arthur B. Carles Portrait of Katherine Rhoades c.1912,
oil on canvas, 25 x 24 inches,
Private Collection, New York

 

 

 

Jean Heiberg Figure Study 1909,
oil on canvas, 28 x 21inches,
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College
Drammen Museum

 

 

Per Krohg Nana 1910
oil on canvas, 28¾ x 23¾ inches,
Private Collection, Oslo

 

 

 

Henri Matisse Nude Study c.1908-09,
pencil on paper, 12 x 9 inches
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Florence Blumenthal, 1910

 

 

Alfred Maurer Fauve Landscape c.1907
oil on board, 21¾ x 18 inches,
Private Collection, New York

 

 

 

Morgan Russell Reclining Woman c.1920
oil on canvas, 29 x 44 inches,
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* CARLES, Arthur Becher
1882 Philadelphia- Philadelphia 1952
A pupil of Thomas Anschutz in Philadelphia at the turn of the Century, Carles made his way to Paris in 1905 and settled more permanently in 1907. Although he did not formally attend the Académie Matisse, Carles befriended both Matisse and Derain, and by his own account, dropped in on classes and profited from his exposure to Matisse's teaching. This is borne out by his fauve influenced landscapes from around this period. Back in the United States, Carles participated in the 1913 Armory Show, and exhibited at the Stieglitz Gallery. Between the wars he evolved an abstract expressionist style that anticipates the New York School. Carles was the father of Mercedes Matter, founder and Dean Emeritus of the New York Studio School.

* DEBERITZ, Per
1880 Horten - Oslo 1945
Deberitz started out as a follower of Edvard Munch, and was a fairly established painter by the time he came to Matisse in 1909. Throughout his oeuvre, a poetic interpretation of the landscape was paramount. Around 1914 he produced a series of paintings of nudes in the landscape which were the focus of considerable attention. Subsequently, his style veered towards synthetic landscape with pronounced contours. His chosen locale was often the south coast of Norway, characteristically depicted in a quick, sketch-like painterly touch.

* GRÜNEWALD, Isaac (Hirsche)
1888 Stockholm- Oslo 1946
Considered one of the leading Swedish artists of the twentieth century, Grünewald was a painter, stage designer and teacher. He studied at the Konstnärförbund School in Stockholm before traveling to Paris where he was enrolled at the Académie Matisse from 1908. He married a fellow Matisse pupil, Sigrid Hjertén, in 1911. Back in Sweden he continued to paint in a fauve style. Although he won a prize to decorate the Register Office of the Stockholm Town Hall he was prevented from carrying out his colorful design. He exhibited, with Hjertén, at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery in Berlin in 1915. In the 1920s he turned his attention to stage design, working in a neo-classical style. In his last years he founded and ran his own art school in Stockholm.

* HEIBERG, Jean (Hjalmmar Dahl)
1884 Kristiana (Oslo)- Oslo 1976
The first Norwegian to enroll at Académie Matisse, he had studied earlier in Kristiana and Munich, and with Jules Renard at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Highly rated by Matisse himself, Heiberg made close study of the work of Cézanne, and later developed strong interests in neo-classical painting theories, deriving from Pedro Araujo a particular fascination with the golden section. From 1919-1929 he was again in Paris, and thereafter based himself in Oslo, where he was director of the Kunstakademi from 1946-1955.

* KARSTEN, Ludvig (Peter)
1876 Kristiana (Oslo)- Paris 1926
The Norwegian painter Ludvig Karsten briefly attended the académie in 1910, but had already met Matisse, and other future fauves, while enrolled in the class of Eugène Carrière in 1900. A graduate of the Royal School of Design in Kristiana, he had also studied under Christian Krohg, father of Matisse pupil Per Krohg, and the leading Norwegian naturalist painter. The major influence during his formative years was Munch, although in Paris he came more under the sway of the Post-Impressionists. In later years he was devoted to free transcriptions of works by Bassano, Ribera and Rembrandt.

* KROHG, Per (Larsson)
1889 Åsgårdstrand, Norway- Oslo 1965
Son of the leading Norwegian realist painter Christian Krohg, Per Krohg spent much of the first half of his life in Paris, where he received his education at the Académie Colarossi, where his father taught, and at the Académie Matisse, which he attended in 1910-11. He experimented in a variety of avantgarde styles, and in the early 1920s adopted the prevailing neo-classicism. Returning to Norway in 1930, he began a distinguished career as a muralist, devoting himself to social themes, and he was responsible for a fresco cycle at the UN Building in New York City 1951-52. Later in life he taught, and was director of the Kunstakademi in Oslo 1955-58, taking over from fellow Matisse pupil Jean Heiberg.

* LEVY, Rudolf
1875 Stettin- northern Italy, 1944
A key personality in the circle of artists centered around the Café du Dôme, Levy was a pupil at Académie Matisse with a life-long fascination for the French painter. A fellow of Hans Purrmann's at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Karlsruhe, he studied with various teachers in Munich before proceeding to Paris. His painting in the 1920s shows awareness of Matisse's latest development, which was as much an influence on him as the earlier work. He fought for Germany during World War One, and made a successful career in Berlin, where his dealer was Alfred Flechtheim. In 1933 he fled from the Nazis and began a decade of exile wandering in France, Spain, Yugoslavia, America and Italy, where he was arrested in Florence by Gestapo agents posing as art dealers. He died on his way to a concentration camp.

* LUNDEBY, Alf
1870 Sølor - Lillehammer 1961
Alf Lundeby was already an established painter and 40 years of age when he arrived at the Académie Matisse. Apart from several alla prima studies from the figure his artistic development was later not manifestly affected by Matisse's tutelage. The same model that he painted at the académie can be seen in works by Sørensen and Karsten.

* MATISSE, Henri
1869 Le Cateau-Cambresis - Nice 1954
When Matisse allowed Sarah Stein and Hans Purrmann to form an academy in his name, which opened in January 1908, his career was entering a period of transition. Approaching forty, his leadership among the Parisian avantgarde was on the wane, with Picasso eagerly assuming the mantle, but he was beginning to enjoy the benefits of an international reputation. In 1908 he staged his first American exhibition at Steiglitz's 291 Gallery. The following year he received Sergei Shchukin's commission to paint the murals, Dance and Music, which he completed in 1910 for the Russian merchant's Moscow palace. Important and steady collectors emerged in Germany where in 1912 his first work would enter a European public collection, the Neue Staatsgalerie in Munich. His illustrious presence in the American artworld also began at this time. He was the subject of successive exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, from the second of which Mrs. Florence Blumenthal purchased the three drawings she presented in 1910 to the Metropolitan Museum, the first works by Matisse to enter a public collection. These drawings are on loan to the exhibition, Académie Matisse, at the Studio School.
Back in 1908, when his fortunes had yet to pick up, the académie brought material advantages to the artist and his family. The Académie Matisse first opened at the former Couvent des Oiseaux, where Matisse actually kept a studio from 1905 when he needed extra space to paint Joie de Vivre. When the government sold this building in Spring 1908 Matisse and his school moved to another expropriated convent, at the Hôtel Biron (once the Couvent du Sacré-Coeur) where the students' fees covered Matisse's own atelier and his family's accomodation.
At first almost all Matisse's students were acquaintances through the Steins. Among these was the Swede, Carl Palme, who would soon be joined by large contingents of Scandinavians. These in turn spread his reputation in their home countries.Matisse's teaching techniques resembled quite closely those of his own master, Gustave Moreau, who combined the classical approach of drawing from the figure and from casts, with a modern individualism that stressed the unforced evolution of personal style. Matisse had studied with Moreau between 1892-97. The man posing for Matisse's sculpture class, caught in the photograph of 1909 with Heiberg, Stein, Purrmann and Bruce looking on, also used to model at Moreau's atelier.
For the student expecting "fauve" treatment Matisse's pedagogy was markedly conservate in two respects: his reverence for the antique, and caution regarding color. Although he shared his insights into modeling in complementaries, according to Max Weber he insisted on reminding his pupils that "local color was beautiful, too." But Matisse's teaching was in no way at odds with his own current practice. Works coeval with his most intense engagement with teaching, such as Nude with a White Scarf and the radically innovative sculpture La Serpentine, both of 1909, relate closely to specific classical sources (the Barberini Faun and the Farnese Hercules respectively) just when he had his students drawing the Apollo Belvedere.
Matisse brought a high seriousness to his teaching which he found impossible to sustain when the académie grew in numbers. After 1909 he cut critiques from every Saturday to bi-weekly visits which also became difficult to keep up after he had moved with his family to the suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. The school closed by summer 1911.

* MAURER, Alfred (Henry)
1868 New York- New York 1932
Like Arthur B. Carles, it is not certain that the American modernist Alfred Maurer actually enrolled at the Académie Matisse, but he is believed to have done, and his work from the period is certainly in the fauve vein. A graduate of the National Academy of Design, New York, his early work, which received critical recognitions, was influenced by Whistler and William Merritt Chase. He was based in Paris from 1897-1914, and continued to paint fauve landscapes - which were exhibited by Stieglitz at the 291 Gallery in 1909 - into the 1920s, when he took up a highly idiosyncratic, expressionist style, painting sylized, somewhat morbid, faces.

* MOLL, Oskar
1875 Brieg, Germany-Berlin 1947
Like Sarah Stein, Oskar Moll was both a pupil and a significant collector of Matisse. A private student of Lovis Corinth's in Berlin at the turn of the century, Moll traveled extensively before settling in Paris in 1907. Through Purrmann and Levy he was introduced to Matisse, and was one of the original ten students in 1908, along with his wife Greta, who sat for the famous portrait by Matisse in the National Gallery, London. Moll formed what would become the largest collection of Matisse's work in Germany. After World War One Moll began a distinguished academic career. In 1925 he became director of the academy at Breslau where he appointed Oska Schlemmer, Georg Muche and others to make it one of the foremost progressive schools in Germany. It was closed by the government in 1932. Moll was dismissed from his next post, at the Staatliche Kunsakademie, Düsseldorf, by the Nazis, who prohibited him from exhibiting. Very few of Moll's paintings survived the bombing of Berlin during World War Two.

* PURRMANN, Hans
1880 Speyer-Basel 1966
The German painter who, with Sarah Stein, co-founded the Académie Matisse in 1908, and served as massier, or student manager, until it closed in 1911. Purrmann was instrumental in spreading Matisse's reputation in Germany, accompanying the French painter on several trips there, finding collectors and writing articles. The son of the successful German painter Georg Heinrich Purrmann, his first teacher, Hans Purrmann studied at Karlsruhe, where he befriended fellow-student Rudolf Levy, another future Matisse pupil, before proceeding to the Akademie in Munich where his professors were Gabriel von Hackl and Franz von Stuck, and classmates included Klee and Kandinsky. In Berlin, 1904-5, he made contact with Max Liebermann and joined the Berlin Secession. The Manet exhibition at the Salon d'Automne drew him to Paris in 1905, but he was overwhelmed by the work of Matisse, to whom he was introduced by Leo Stein. He lived in Paris until 1914 and was an active member of the group that gathered at the Café du Dôme. In 1912 he married Mathilde Vollmoeller (1876-1943), also a student at the Académie. Purrmann's mature style retained the strong influence of fauvism in its bold color and lyrical response to landscape. After his Paris period, Purrmann lived in Berlin and Switzerland, until 1935 when he moved to Florence and took direction of the German Art Foundation at the Villa Romana. From 1943 to his death he lived and painted in the Ticino.

* REVOLD, Alex (Julius)
1887 Alesund, Norway - Bacrum 1962
Trained at the Royal School of Design in Kristiana, Revold studied with Matisse 1908-10. He was additionally influenced by Kees van Dongen and André Lhote, and for a while experimented in a Cubist idiom. An important commission to decorate the Bergen stock exchange in 1918 marked the beginning of his career as a muralist. In his mature work he often took life in his native northern Norway as his subject. Inspired perhaps by Matisse's example, Revold founded private schools in Kristiana in 1916 and 1924, and was director of the Kunstakademi from 1935-46, preceding fellow Matisse pupils Jean Heiberg and Per Krohg in this position.

* RUSSELL, Morgan
1886 New York - Broomall, PA 1953
Russell was sponsored in his first trip to Europe by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the patron so intimately associated with the New York Studio School's building, and returned to study with Robert Henri. Back in Paris in 1908, he was introduced to Picasso and Matisse by Leo and Gertrude Stein, and enrolled at the Académie Matisse. He advanced his interest in color theory under the Canadian painter Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart, and went on to co-found the Orphist-influenced movement, Synchromism, with Stanton Macdonald Wright. By the 1920s, however, he turned his back on abstract painting, and came under the renewed influence of Matisse before turning to religious murals.

* SØRENSEN, Henrik
1882 Värmland, Sweden - Oslo 1962
This Swedish-born Norwegian painter was arguably Matisse's most significant Scandinavian pupil. After briefly studying at the Royal School of Design in Kristiana, Sørensen enrolled at Kristian Zahrtmann's in Copenhagen and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. He attended the Académie Matisse for just a couple of months in the winter of 1908, and then again in 1910. His exhibition of fauve inspired paintings at the Hallins Gallery in Stockholm in 1911 was a succès de scandale. Further travels in Europe exposed Sørensen to the Italian Renaissance which influenced his later religious paintings and secular murals. Sørensen was the leader of the secessionist group, De 14, which included both former Matisse pupils and arts and crafts-oriented nationalist painters associated, as he was, with the Lysakerkretsen. His later work took on an expressionistic character and reflected a mystical sense of nature and his deeply held pacifism. He completed important murals at the League of Nations in Geneva, Linköping Cathedral, Sweden, and Oslo Town Hall. In later years he was the grand old man of Norwegian art. Two museums are dedicated to his work, in Holmsbu and Telemark.

* SMITH, Sir Matthew
1879 Halifax- London 1959
Matisse's only significant English pupil. As a student at the Slade in London, Smith had been derided by the notorious Professor Tonks for his lack of talent, and left without graduating when his health broke down to recuperate in France. He arrived in Paris in 1910 and attended the académie in its last weeks. Nonetheless, the impact of this experience was tremendous, and a few years later he began to paint with fauve color and brushstrokes. His work was praised by Sickert, and in its mature style, from the 1920s onwards, represents a fusion of Matisse's color and decorative sensibility and Sickert's social and psychological penetration. In the postwar period Smith enjoyed very high standing among British painters and was acknowledged as an influence by Francis Bacon.

* SIMONSSON, Birger
1883 Uddevalla-1938
Like several Scandinavian pupils at Académie Matisse, the Swede Birger Simonsson studied earlier with Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen. While his portraits remained in a traditional vein, his landscapes and still life paintings place him at the vanguard of Swedish modernism, along with fellow Matisse students Isaac Grünewald and Gösta Sandels. In 1922, in Paris, Simonsson co-founded the Phalanx group with the Swedish painter Otte Sköld.

* WEBER, Max
1881 Bialystok - Great Neck, New York 1961
Matisse's best-known American pupil, Weber was a pioneer of American modernism, experimenting in his own work with styles as diverse as cubism, expressionism, futurism and abstraction, and exerting considerable influence as a teacher and writer. He emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten, and studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with Arthur Wesley Dow, who had in turn worked with Gauguin. In Paris between 1905 and 1908, Weber studied at Colarossi, Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and, in its year of inception, Académie Matisse. Returning to the United States he staged one-man exhibitions at Stieglitz's Gallery 291, and became a leading figure in the American avantgarde. At the Art Students League many future painters of note came under his tutelage, including Mark Rothko. His own work moved through avantgarde idioms to settle on a lyrical expressionism which explored aspects of his Jewish heritage, although he returned to abstract experiment periodically. He was the subject of a Whitney Retrospective in 1949.

FURTHER READING:
introduction to Academie Matisse

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