The “Matisse by Matisse” exhibition, ran from July 15 July to October 15, 2023 at UCCA, Beijing and then from November 4 November to February 18, 2024 at UCCA Edge, Shanghai, in collaboration with the Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, and on the initiative of Doors. The exhibition plunges visitors into the works of the inventor of “Fauvism”, providing a fascinating insight into the painter’s artistic creation and experiments, and traces the influence of Fauvism on the Chinese art scene in the modern period (1920-1940).   

Matisse was one of the only painters of his generation to be tempted by Chinese calligraphy, which he admired but not practiced himself though. It encapsulates both a reflection on light and on the intensity of colour characteristic of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist research; As Cézanne said, “Shadow is a colour like light, but less brilliant”. Matisse seems to have drawn inspiration from this theory in the contrast he painted in Vence in 1948 between the black-and-white exterior and the colourful decoration of the Grand intérieur rouge. Calligraphy also offered Matisse a model of lived art in which body and brush became one, the movement of the hand joining that of the mind. The quest for this union found expression in a letter to his writer friend Paul Rouveyre on how to draw a tree “à la chinoise”. According to Matisse, the Chinese masters would encourage their pupils to feel the upward movement of the brush as an echo of the natural elevation of the tree towards the sky. This analogy enabled him to think of the canvas as a calligraphic space in which emptiness takes on its full meaning and, in turn, nourishes the meaning given to fullness, an example of which can be found in the preparation of the ceramic representing the tree of life, made for the dining room of the villa owned by the publisher Tériade. This reflection culminated in 1947 when Matisse began decorating Vence Cathedral in search of space in the sense given to it by Chinese aesthetics. The simplicity of the drawn flower and that of the Virgin and Child, with their elliptical outlines, outlines the emptiness of a space that Matisse described as a “Chinese composition”, while the figure of Saint Dominique was compared to that of a “great Asian Buddha”.  

Matisse’s influence was so important that a “Chinese Matisse” appeared in the art scene of the 1930s, Sanyu(1895-1966), an artist established in France in the early 1920s who quickly made a place among the painters then gathered around Montparnasse, trained at the Grand Chaumière academy, more avant-garde and experimental than the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. Be it the flat areas, the floral motifs or the generous curves of the women he represents, his painting evokes that of Matisse for the European eye. But it is not so much a real imitation as a shared convergence of their interests in decoration, calligraphy and the treatment of color. The proof is that Sanyu did not wait for Matisse’s experiments to try his hand at engraving on linoleum.

Liu Haisu (1896-1994), an artist and professor of Western art history at Peking University, is credited with popularising Matisse’s work in China. From 1925 onwards, he wrote regular columns about Matisse and was the first to publish a catalogue of his works. Founder of the College of Fine Arts in Shanghai, he also played a considerable role in importing modern European art to China. The discovery of Matisse’s work gave rise to lively debate in Chinese society at the time. The most famous of these broke out in 1929 on the occasion of the first national art exhibition between the painter Xu Beihong and the poet Xu Zhimo. In an article entitled “Confused”, the painter, who had received an academic training in european realism at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, denounced Matisse’s work as that of an incompetent who disguised his lack of technical mastery behind “vulgar” mixtures of colour, and even went so far as to claim that the artistic landscape of the time was full of “Horses kicked to death” (matisi), a pun on the characters of his name in Chinese. The poet responded with an article entitled “Confused, too” in which he defended Matisse’s pictorial advances, and more generally those of the “post-impressionists” (a vague term used to describe the avant-gardes since the end of the 19th century), which, far from being worthless scribbles, on the contrary demonstrated a virtuosity of colour and composition. Without realising it, these two artists had just sparked off the first controversy in the history of modern art in China, one that would prove decisive for a whole generation of young painters. 

Other artists, however, such as Walasse Ting (1929-2010) whose English pseudonym was chosen to echo Matisse’s last letters, did claim a direct legacy with the man who allowed a renewal of the pictorial space. First attracted by the expressive power of Fauvism, he then turned to an art form close to the action painting of American Expressionism , which sought to abolish the separation between the pictorial gesture and the resulting work on the canvas, through calligraphic abstractions, which were an opportunity for him to reinvest the reflections on the line and the brushstrokes of Matisse. His trajectory is characteristic of the horizons opened by the « painter from Nice »  for modern art but also contemporary art.