SAGAMORE SOUTH BEACH COLLABORATES WITH CONTESSA GALLERY

FOR LOBBY TAKEOVER FEATURING ART BY ALEXI TORRES
The Historic Art Deco Hotel Will Display “Woven Connections,” an Exhibition
Featuring Works by Alexi Torres Presented by Contessa Gallery

Miami Beach’s historic art deco hotel Sagamore South Beach announces an exciting collaboration with Palm Beach-based Contessa Gallery, an acclaimed fine art gallery offering high-quality artworks and acquisition counsel to collectors, museums and institutions. Through April 21, 2023, the prestigious gallery will take over the hotel lobby with a solo exhibition by Cuban-born artist Alexi Torres entitled “Woven Connections.”

Known for his surreal large-scale oil paintings that appear as if they are knitted and woven, Torres draws
inspiration from everyday organic objects such as leaves, feathers, baskets and cloth. His work is driven by a love of nature and a dedication to perfecting his intricate “woven” painting technique. Each of his incredible pieces creates a three-dimensional, multilayered illusion that draws viewers in for a closer look.
Inspired by his Cuban upbringing, Torres views art-making as planting an idea and harvesting it. He builds the stretchers, stretches the canvases and primes them himself. Like his ancestors during the harvest, he starts and finishes each work following the cycle of the waning moon.
“We are so excited to collaborate with Contessa Gallery and to display Alexi Torres’ magnificent works of art in
our lobby,” said Sagamore South Beach Owner and Artistic Director Ronit Neuman. “The Sagamore prides itself on its year-round art programming and museum-quality exhibitions, so it’s a natural fit for us to collaborate with such a renowned and respected gallery.”

“We are very excited about our collaboration with the Sagamore, which has been a premier art hotel for
decades,” said Contessa Gallery founder and owner Steven Hartman, who opened Contessa Gallery in Cleveland in the late ’90s to fulfill his passion for becoming a fine art dealer. In 2016, he opened the Palm Beach location after a decade of participating in prestigious West Palm Beach art fairs. “When you mix the proper venue and context with the right gallery curation – and the incredible talent of Alexi Torres’ caliber – magic happens.” “Woven Connections” will be on view in the Sagamore South Beach lobby through April 21, 2023. All works displayed will be available for sale to the public.

The exclusive lobby exhibition is part of the hotel’s ongoing Sagamore Is Art platform, which presents year-round rotating art exhibits and exclusive partnerships with leading artists, museums and non-for-profits. It provides a unique opportunity for all to immerse in the art world by keeping all works on view 24/7 and completely free to the public.

About Contessa Gallery
Founded in 1999 in Cleveland, Contessa Gallery is a Fine Art Dealers Association Member (FADA) that offers high-quality artworks and art acquisition counsel to collectors, museums and institutions. Coupled with a strong commitment to service and connoisseurship, the gallery has developed a local, national and international following and a reputation for integrity and excellence. While many galleries focus on artist representation and promotion, Contessa Gallery is dedicated to assisting collectors in developing collections that have deep personal meaning. It encourages clients to view their collections as a legacy to be passed down through generations of family or to museums. Contessa Gallery is owned by founder Steven Hartman, president of the Board of Directors for FADA. He has won several art industry awards and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Art World News magazine. For more information, visit www.contessagallery.com.

About Sagamore South Beach

Sagamore South Beach has been a destination for both locals and tourists alike since the Art Deco District was created in the 1940s. Located at 1671 Collins Avenue in the heart of South Beach, the 101-room hotel, with an ample number of suites, boasts some of the largest standard rooms in the area. The oceanfront boutique hotel is surrounded by history, culture and the city’s trendiest restaurants, shopping and nightlife, creating the ultimate setting for the ongoing series #SagamoreIsArt. Sagamore ownership, led by Ronit Neuman, is committed to offering a multicultural selling platform that supports and builds partnerships with local and international organizations that work together to promote the growth of everything art-related. For more information, visit www.sagamoresouthbeach.com or follow @sagamorehotel on Facebook and Instagram.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

Magdalena Dabrowski
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.

Initially trained as a lawyer, Matisse developed an interest in art only at age twenty-one. In 1891, he moved to Paris to study art and followed the traditional nineteenth-century academic path, first at the Académie Julian (winter 1891–92, under the conservative William-Adolphe Bouguereau), and then at the École des Beaux-Arts (1892, under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau). Matisse’s early work, which he began exhibiting in 1895, was informed by the dry academic manner, particularly evident in his drawing. Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, he began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language.

In its palette and technique, Matisse’s early work showed the influence of an older generation of his compatriots: Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). In the summer of 1904, while visiting his artist friend Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez, a small fishing village in Provence, Matisse discovered the bright light of southern France, which contributed to a change to a much brighter palette. He also was exposed, through Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, living in nearby Lavandou, to a pointillist technique of small color dots (points) in complementary colors, perfected in the 1880s by Georges Seurat (1859–1891). As a result, Matisse produced his Neo-Impressionist masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté (1904; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), so titled after a poem by Charles Baudelaire, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (spring 1905) to great acclaim. The next summer, in Collioure, a seaport also on the Mediterranean coast, where he vacationed in the company of André Derain (1880–1954), Matisse created brilliantly colored canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork, ranging from thick impasto to flat areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque-like line. Paintings such as Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), when exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, gave rise to the the first of the avant-garde movements (fall 1905–7), named “Fauvism” (from the French word fauve or “wild beast”) by a contemporary art critic, referring to its use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic brushwork to structure the composition. During his brief Fauvist period, Matisse produced a significant number of remarkable canvases, such as the portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Line (1905; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen); Bonheur de vivre (1905–6; Barnes Collection, Merion, Pa.); Marguerite Reading (ca. 1906; Museum of Modern Art, New York); two versions of the Young Sailor (1906), the second of which is in the Metropolitan Museum (1999.363.41); Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art); and two versions of Le Luxe (1907), among others.

Subsequently, Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover the “essential character of things” and to produce an art of “balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it in his “Notes of a Painter” in 1908. The years 1908–13 were focused on art and decoration, producing several large canvases such as Reclining Odalisque (1908; 1999.363.44); two important mural-size commissions, Dance and Music (1909–10), for the Moscow house of his Russian patron Sergei I. Shchukin; a trio of large studio interiors, exemplified by The Red Studio (1911; MoMA, New York); and a group of spectacularly colored Moroccan pictures. These were followed by four years (1913–17) of experimentation and discourse with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The resulting compositions were much more austere, almost geometrically structured and at times close to abstraction, as shown in the View of Notre-Dame (1914; MoMA, New York), The Yellow Curtain (1915; private collection), The Piano Lesson (1916; MoMA, New York), Bathers by a River (1916; Art Institute, Chicago), and a group of portraits in which a seated figure or the sitter’s head is positioned against a thinly brushed, neutral background. Yet he also created meticulously drawn portraits such as the famous Plumed Hat (1919; MoMA, New York).

In the autumn of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice in the south of France, and eventually settled there for the rest of his life. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse’s own creation. These paintings are suffused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate a hothouse atmosphere suggestive of a harem.

In 1929, Matisse temporarily stopped painting easel pictures. He then traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania. Dr. Albert Barnes, an important collector of modern art and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion in Merion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Bonheur de vivre. The mural (in two versions due to an error in dimensions) was installed in May 1933, and remains in place at the Barnes Foundation (Merion, Pa.). The composition highlighted the simplicity of female figures in exuberant motion against an abstract, almost geometric background. In preparation for the mural, Matisse began using a new technique—that of building up the composition from cutout shapes of previously colored paper. From 1940 onward, the paper cutouts became Matisse’s favored exploratory medium and, until the end of his life, the dominant medium of expression.

Another medium that Matisse explored and experimented with throughout his lifetime was drawing. As the most direct expression of the artist’s thoughts, drawing often helped Matisse to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas. During the mid-1930s, he created distinctive series of pen-and-ink drawings on the subject of the artist and his model, while in the early 1940s he conceived his famous sequences of Thèmes et Variations, sensitively drawn spare works in elegant, unshaded line, describing simplified forms of female figures or still lifes. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, his drawings become bolder, the contour line thicker, the forms even more simplified and devoid of detail. The latest large drawings of acrobats (1951–52), executed with a thick brush placed at the end of a long stick, are made up of contour only. They are contemporaneous with a cutout series of Blue Nudes (2002.456.58), and the two mediums seem to represent two different approaches to form and space. The relationship between figure-ground becomes ambiguous and space complements the intended form. The form appears almost sculptural.

Sculpture was another medium pursued by Matisse since his early years, and although independent in expression, it was frequently used to find a solution to pictorial problems or became an inspiration to painting. More than half of Matisse’s sculptures were completed between 1900 and 1910; he also frequently worked in series, manipulating the form and simplifying it over the years. Among his best-known works belong the series of four Back reliefs (1903–31), the series of five Jeannette heads (1910–16), and the Large Seated Nude (1925–29).

Matisse’s creativity extended into the area of graphic arts and book illustration, the latter begun when he was already in his sixties, with the illustrations to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932), and culminated with the cutout compositions (1943–44) for his book Jazz (published in 1947). But the crowning achievement of Matisse’s career was the commission for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948–51), for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, even the vestments and altarcloths. The beauty and simplicity of this project constituted Matisse’s spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk and attested to his creative genius.

Citation

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Henri Matisse (1869–1954).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mati/hd_mati.htm (October 2004)

Geometric Abstraction

Magdalena Dabrowski
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1907–8, Cubism subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding visual world in the illusionistic—post-Renaissance—perspectival space. The Analytic Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase—Synthetic Cubism, 1912–14—introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and “constructional” elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from the Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical “reality” of the explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of painting.

This process of evolving a purely pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia. In Holland, the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language was Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). Along with other members of the De Stijl group—Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960)—Mondrian’s work was intended to convey “absolute reality,” construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Mondrian’s geometric style, which he termed “Neoplasticism,” developed between 1915 and 1920. In that year, he published his manifesto “Le Néoplasticisme” and for the next two-and-a-half decades continued to work in his characteristic geometric style, expunged of all references to the real world, and posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

In Russia, the language of geometric abstraction first appeared in 1915 in the work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) (Museum of Modern Art, New York), in the style he termed Suprematism. Creating nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, Malevich strove to achieve “the absolute,” the higher spiritual reality that he called the “fourth dimension.” Simultaneously, his compatriot Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) originated a new geometric abstract idiom in an innovative three-dimensional form, which he first dubbed “painterly reliefs” and subsequently “counter-reliefs” (1915–17). These were assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form was dictated by their inherent properties, such as wood, metal, or glass. That principle, which Tatlin called “the culture of materials,” spurred the rise of the Russian avant-garde movement Constructivism (1918–21), which explored geometric form in two and three dimensions. The main practitioners of Constructivism included Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), and El Lissitzky (1890–1941). It was Lissitzky who became the transmitter of Constructivism to Germany, where its principles were later embodied in the teachings of the Bauhaus. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, it became during the 1920s (and until its dismantling by the Nazis in 1933) the vital proponent of geometric abstraction and experimental modern architecture. As a teaching institution, the Bauhaus encompassed different disciplines: painting, graphic arts, stage design, theater, and architecture. The art faculty was recruited from among the most distinguished painters of the time: Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, all of whom were devoted to the ideal of the purity of geometric form as the most appropriate expression of the modernist canon.

In France, during the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated broad use of geometric form for ornamental purposes in the decorative and applied arts as well as in architecture. In the 1930s, Paris became the center of a geometric abstraction that arose out of its Synthetic Cubist sources and focused around the group Cercle et Carré (1930), and later Abstraction-Création (1932). With the outbreak of World War II, the focus of geometric abstraction shifted to New York, where the tradition was continued by the American Abstract Artists group (formed in 1937), including Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. With the arrival of the Europeans Josef Albers (1933) and Piet Mondrian (1940), and such major events as the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (1939, now the Guggenheim), the geometric tradition acquired a new resonance, but it was essentially past its creative phase. Its influences, however, reached younger generations of artists, most directly affecting the Minimalist art of the 1960s, which used pure geometric form, stripped to its austere essentials, as the primary language of expression. Artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Dorothea Rockburne studied the geometric tradition and transformed it into their own artistic vocabulary.

Citation

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Geometric Abstraction.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm (October 2004)