ISABELLE BONZOM

SYMPOSIUM "MATISSE IMPACT"

a 2-day conference in Paris organized by IESA art&culture in partnership with the Fondation de l’Alliance Française at the Alliance Française, 101 boulevard Raspail, March 14 & 15, from 10 am to 6 pm.

Curated by artist and art historian Isabelle Bonzom, this symposium explored Matisse’s specific artistic language and iconography. Among the topics of discussion were the female nude, the artistic process, the cut-outs, the pictorial space, the decorative art and possible filiations from Ellsworth Kelly to Howard Hodgkin. The first day was dedicated to an examination of the art of Matisse, while the second day focussed on issues related to his legacy.

This interdisciplinary 2-day conference brought together several generations of scholars. Lecturers were philosophers Eric Alliez, Georges Roque and Eliane Escoubas, curators Cécile Debray, Dominique Szymusiak and Ann Hindry, art critics Itzhak Goldberg and Pierre Sterckx, costume expert Thierry Tessier, as well as artists Isabelle Bonzom and Jean-Pierre Raynaud. This symposium fostered stimulating exchanges between the lecturers as well as between them and the audience.

More info about this conference which was held in French here.

"Entrance to the Casbah", 1912-13, oil on canvas, Matisse, Henri (1869-1954)

Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia 

© 2014 Succession H. Matisse/ DACS, London / The Bridgeman Art Library

During this 2-day conference, Isabelle Bonzom lectured :

Crystallizations and overflows according to Matisse and Hodgkin

English painter Howard Hodgkin, whose work has been shown many times at the Tate Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia among other venues, finds in Matisse a kinship which has to do, in particular, with what Hodgkin calls “moral identity”. For these two artists, painting is concentration and expansion, calm and catastrophe. These two monsters of color relationships, at once raw, sophisticated and unexpected, cultivate the paradoxical. The pictorial space is complex, radical, sensual and very thought out.