Shirley Jaffe -Before and After Matisse

Two personal exhibitions will have been dedicated to Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) at the Matisse museum in Nice. When she exhibited there for the first time, in 1994, at the invitation of Xavier Girard, as usual, the artist took care to show recent paintings. The idea of a retrospective hardly concerned her. Jaffe was not the type to worry about his career and even less about turning back on her. The pictures she was painting took up all her energy. The ones she had just painted still held her attention - was she going the wrong way? should she deviate from the one she had just traced? - to the point of detachment which returned her to the sole "religion" of the present. Her attitude was her own, but it deprived the public who discovered her work of the legitimate desire to understand how she had arrived there. Only his oldest companions knew. The others just had to jump on the bandwagon. No, a retrospective was unthinkable during the artist's lifetime. And even less what such a project involves in biographical research as Jaffe was so reluctant to talk about herself: out of modesty as much as out of contempt for the complacency that so many others have in telling themselves.

Art Exhibition in Nice

The current exhibition in Nice comes after the retrospective at the Center Pompidou, augmented by that at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. It takes up the chronological sequence from the beginning to the end, while contracting it. She considers Jaffe before and after Matisse. Because the comparison has always been necessary between the latest works of the French master and the mature paintings of the American.

Jaffe didn't talk about it willingly. However, we now know what impact the exhibition of Matisse's paper cutouts presented by François Mathey at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1961 in Paris had on her. It is therefore not by chance that Jaffe comes and returns to Nice. And if it was not very easy to dialogue with her, the exhibition hopes that a dialogue will finally be established between the two artists and we are curious to know what they will say to each other from the bottom up: from the reception to the area around the last room of the permanent collection where the cut-out gouache works are displayed. It is Matisse today who invites.

The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Center Pompidou, Paris, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, in Basel.
The exhibition was presented from April 20 to August 29, 2022 at the Center Pompidou (under the title Shirley Jaffe. An American in Paris) and from March 25 to July 30, 2023 at the Kunstmuseum Basel (under the title Shirley Jaffe. Form and Experience).