Girl with Tulips 1910

Here is the audio guide script about Henri Matisse’s Girl with Tulips, currently at the Hermitage Museum. Imagine Matisse in front of his easel, sometime in the early 1900s, conjuring this vision of a girl with tulips with oil paint, probably pushing the paint around, maybe thinning it with turpentine, then building it up again. Look at that incredible blue background, and the ochre section behind her—so flat and yet so full of feeling. The girl’s face is tilted down, her expression almost melancholy, the tulips standing to attention on the table in front. The dark outline emphasizes the forms, the colors are so simple and direct, yet they create a complex emotional space. He’s so clearly looking at Cezanne here, but in a way that only Matisse could; the construction of form and space is so carefully considered, yet rendered with such freedom. The girl is there, but she's also not really there, it's more a construction of feelings. Painters like Matisse and Cezanne, they are having a conversation, they’re pushing painting in a new direction and it goes on through time.