Dear to the heart and collection of Frankfurt, Germany’s Städel Museum, Henri Matisse painted “Flowers and Ceramic Plate” (“Blumen und Keramik”) using oil on canvas in 1913.
While lovely to our eyes now, Matisse was then not only enjoying color but also experimenting with radically new, in the European aesthetic, perspectives, some well-practiced and well-received in other parts of the world, such as Africa and Japan, and making their way into Europe via trade.
Like Picasso and Braque and their contemporaneous alignment of reduced objects into a shallow space using multiple vantage points (“cubism”), Matisse renders objects placed in close proximity to each other from different vantage points and perspectives.
The flowers are painted as viewed from a side perspective. The ceramic plate is painted as viewed from above.
As the Städel Museum points out:
“This new form of beauty gives preference to the surface over spatial depth and was highly controversial at the time.
“That means the end of the spatial illusionism European painters had worked so hard to perfect over many centuries.”
See: “Henri Matisse: Flowers and Ceramic Plate,” 1913 (oil on canvas), Städel Museum
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