Henri Matisse – Nonsite.org

Le Corbusier, Matisse, and the Meaning of Conceptual Art

April 10, 2020

The humanities is devoted to a “bad picture” of intentionality. And the devotion to this picture is embraced above all by anti-intentionalists. Looking closely at the seemingly suspect commitments of two conceptually driven artists—Le Corbusier and Henri Matisse—I show the necessity for distinguishing between inner and outer, idea and execution, and how those terms are mutually imbricated. Failing to address “private” experience, as anti-intentionalists do, generates an inverted form of Cartesianism.

Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism

June 22, 2015

Let me be clear, the problems I raise do not stem from a dissatisfaction with the way October authors repeat a kind of party line. In fact, I envy the unity and consistency of the resolve and of course their massive impact on the discipline (what is there, politically speaking, besides anti-hierarchy in the humanities?). My point is that the basic set of claims shared by many of these authors is mistaken.

Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall

January 25, 2011

We should give ourselves up to the lies of art to deliver ourselves from the lies of myth: it is by this very paradoxical and singular way of absorption into the framework of one of the “great works” of the Occident that Picasso belongs to myth. For if it is true that he always sought to combat myth, making him even more dependent on it, he only succeeded by turning myth’s own arms onto itself—that is, the “lie.”

Tag: Henri Matisse

Le Corbusier, Matisse, and the Meaning of Conceptual Art

Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism

Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall