Ellen McBreen, MATISSE'S PALETTE OF OBJECTS – Matisse Symposium
Channel: Barnes Foundation
Date: 2016-11-21

Matisse referred to the group of African and Oceanic sculpture, textiles, furniture, vases, and other objets d'art that moved with him from studio to studio a "working library." This "palette d'objets"–Louis Aragon's term–is key to understanding the abstractions Matisse made from them and the non-Western cultural appropriations at the heart of his modernism.

Ellen McBreen, PhD, teaches art history at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts. She is the author of Matisse's Sculpture: The Pinup an the Primitive (Yale University Press, 2014), a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is organizing Matisse in the Studio, which opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2017 and travels to London's Royal Academy.

Inspired by the Foundation’s catalogue Matisse in the Barnes Foundation (http://bit.ly/MatisseBarnes), edited by Yve-Alain Bois and published in December 2015, this symposium brings together leading international scholars to examine Matisse in the context of the history of modernism.