Sophie Matisse at Francis M. Naumann and Mike Bidlo at P.S. 1 - New York - exhibitions of the artists' works

Known in the art world for appropriating famous paintings and selectively removing their primary figures or central objects, the painter Sophie Matisse recently drew wider comment (including an article in the New Yorker) for her own colorized versions of Picasso's grisaille antiwar testament, Guernica. The artist--the great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse--accepted her dealer Francis M. Naumann's invitation to undertake the Guernica project for an exhibition in his gallery to coincide with MOMA's landmark survey of Matisse and Picasso. Both shows opened on Feb. 13, 2003. "Sophie Matisse Does Guernica" included a large (though not full-scale) variant in brilliant hues, plus smaller paintings, studies and drawings. Two weeks earlier, a tapestry version of Guernica in shades of brown hanging outside the entrance to the United Nations Security Council was deemed inappropriate as a backdrop for photo opportunities and televised remarks to the press, and was hidden behind a large blue curtain as Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of the imminent invasion of Iraq.

Sophie Matisse had never seen Guernica, but she and her child did witness the apocalyptic destruction of the World Trade Center towers from the streets of Tribeca, and that event affected her approach to Guernica. Concerned with the introduction of color and adaptations of form, she worked from photocopies of reproductions and colored them with gouache. A mother and child in the manner of Henri Matisse appear in the pencil drawing, Study for Guernica (2002).

Hung above the gallery's fireplace, the 3-by-6-foot painting 911 Guernica I (2003) strays farthest from the original, but is closest to Sophie Matisse's personal experience of catastrophe in Manhattan. The Twin Towers replace the burning building of Picasso's design. A figure falls through a yellow sky. A mother--Sophie Matisse--holds her child as they look up to a sky clouded with a fragment of a U.S. banknote in a landscape dominated by a classically figured horse and shaded by newsprint collages tallying the number of Americans and Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War. By the time of the opening, the artist had produced a number of handsome studies, many of them in gouache. Scaled down to 8 1/2 by 19 3/8 feet, her largest Guernica is most faithful to the Picasso design, albeit flaunting a palette steeped in the reds, blues and yellows of Henri Matisse's interiors.

Having encouraged the Sophie Matisse project at Naumann's gallery, veteran appropriationist Mike Bidlo himself mounted an installation thematically related to "Matisse/Picasso" in a sunny corner gallery at P.S. 1 in Long Island City. Bidlo's homage, "Matisse/Picasso: A Cross Examination," revised and enlarged to mural scale the iconic self-portraits of Matisse and Picasso that appeared everywhere in publicity materials in conjunction with the MOMA show. Rendered in black and white directly on interestingly irregular walls, they reversed the Sophie Matisse project, scaling up instead of down, and removing the color of their prototypes. Giant faces reflect the beatification of these two warhorses of modernism--veritable sacred monsters. While bold, sweeping lines limn Bidlo's versions of the self-portraits, his paintings also incorporate many hundreds of handprints in black shading into gray and white. A key factor in the work's making, Bidlo's handprints invite reference to the signs of authorship and objectness in Jackson Pollock, to the river mud handprints of Richard Long, and most prominently, to British artist Marcus Harvey's black-and-white portrait, Myra (1995), a 13-by-10-foot painting of a convicted serial child killer. An accretion of many small handprints, the size of a child's, forms the entire image. The Harvey portrait was a controversial element of the 1997 exhibition, "Sensation."

Elsewhere at P.S. 1 were many small paintings by various New York-based artists expressly made for an informal exhibition, "After Matisse Picasso." They leaned like magazines on narrow shelves around the cafe. The paintings were to one degree or another responsive to the artists' experience of the MOMA exhibition.

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