Poésies by Stéphane Mallarmé Bought for the collections of the Matisse Museum Nice

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27 November 2023

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The City of Nice has just acquired by purchase Poésies for the collections of the Matisse Museum Nice. This acquisition was made with the exceptional financial support of the New Association of Friends of the Matisse Museum in Nice. The entry of this edition into the collections of the Matisse Museum which now preserves all of the artist's illustrated books, positions the institution as a reference center for the study of this important part of Henri Matisse's creation.

Graphic arts, photography, documentary linked to Henri Matisse

While the collections of the Matisse Museum are essentially based on donations linked to donations from Henri Matisse and his heirs to the City of Nice since 1953, to which must be added State deposits, we must today diversify our acquisition methods and to develop a real purchasing policy allowing our institution to pursue its mission of enriching its collections. Targeted reflection on graphic arts collections, printed matter, photography and documentary funds allows to consider a reasoned enrichment of the collections favoring a fruitful transversality with the museum collection. Indeed, many acquisitions could relate to paintings from the Matisse museum, others would shed light on Henri Matisse's creative process, at the heart of the museum's scientific project, and would contribute to broadening and renewing the understanding of the collection. in this context of an acquisition policy favoring resonances, the Matisse museum wished to acquire Poésies, the only book illustrated by Matisse missing from its funds, and thus relaunch a dynamic of annual purchases.

Henri Matisse, painter illustrator of the French Riviera

Henri Matisse established himself as one of the great painter-illustrators of the 20th century. However, he only came to this activity late, through the commissions of Poésies by Stéphane Mallarmé in 1930 then Ulysses by James Joyce in 1935, before devoting himself to it regularly after his operation in 1941. He thus produced eleven books between 1942 and 1952. Matisse was a great reader, familiar, since his Parisian beginnings, with literary circles. He was also a book lover as revealed by his vast library at Régina which included some beautiful editions found in Paris or Nice.
Mallarmé's Poems also respond to Matisse's personal concerns. Certain illustrations evoke his recent trip to Tahiti, such as that of the poem "Les Fenêtres", from which he painted Tahiti I to respond to Marie's commission for a tapestry. Cuttoli.

This cartoon is inspired by an etching representing the view, from a window, of the port of Papeete that Matisse had drawn and photographed during a stay in Tahiti in 1930. Matisse transposes this motif onto a canvas of almost two meters high by adding a decorative border of tropical gardenias but when he discovered the tapestry on the loom, he was disappointed. He therefore created a second cartoon, Tahiti II, abandoning oil for gouache in order to obtain a flatter and sharper effect, which he ultimately judged to be better suited to stained glass than to tapestry.

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