Professor Alastair Wright Matisse Essay

Professor Alastair Wright has had an essay on Matisse’s response to the art of West Africa translated into Hungarian and Japanese. The essay appears in the catalogue of an exhibition of the Pompidou’s Matisse collection organized by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and traveling to Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. 

In the early years of the twentieth century Matisse was among a number of artists working in Paris who began to collect African art. The artists’ interest in these objects was framed by French colonialism and by racist views of African culture as more ‘primitive’ than European. Professor Wright’s essay argues that Matisse’s work propagated such ideas but also complicated them.