MMaxi

Nu Bleau ( Souvenir de Biskra ) 1906



Biskra
Arabic: biskra



Biskra


City and oasis in north-eastern Algeria with 190,000 inhabitants (2005 estimate), at the northern edge of the Sahara. Biskra is the centre of the Zab group of oases located in the depression between the Aurès Mountains and the Tell Atlas Mountains.
It is the capital of Biskra province with 650,000 inhabitants (2005 estimate) and an area of 20,986 km².
The economy is mainly based on large scale agriculture, which is made possible with water collected in the Wadi Biskra Dam, and distributed by irrigation. The main product is dates, of which the high-quality Deglet Nur is grown in the Tolga oasis 40 km to the west. Other important products include wheat and barley, figs, pomegranates, apricots and olives. National tourism is also of importance to Biskra, due to its nice winter climate and sulfur springs, which are used both for recreation and the treatment of rheumatism and skin diseases.
Biskra is well-connected with other urban centres in Algeria, with road, rail and a national airport. Batna lies 120 km northeast and El Oued 230 km southeast.
Biskra is nice city with broad, tree-lined streets and many public gardens.

HISTORY
The area was the site of the Roman military post of Vescera.
9th century: The area is conquered by the Muslims.
12th century: The Zab gains partial independence, and Biskra serves as capital.
13th century: Falls to the Hafsid dynasty.
1552: Conquered by the Ottomans.
1844: The French conquer Biskra and establish a garrison here.
1849: A fort, named Saint-Germain, is built on the site of the former kasbah. It is finished 2 years later.
1969: Great floods destroy much of the Zab oasis.

MMaxi

"There was some truth, if a very limited truth, to the cries of barbarism. Time and again, Matisse set down an image of a pre-civilized world, Eden before the Fall, inhabited by men and women with no history, languid as plants or energetic as animals. Then, as now, this image held great appeal for the over-civilized, and one such man was Matisse's biggest patron, the Moscow industrialist Sergey Shchukin, who at regular intervals would descend on Paris and clean his studio out. The relationship between Shchukin and Matisse, like the visits of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe to France, was one of the components of a Paris-Moscow axis that would be destroyed forever by the Revolution. Shchukin commissioned Matisse to paint two murals for the grand staircase of his house in Moscow, the Trubetskoy Palace. Their themes were "Dance" and "Music".

"Even when seen in a neutral museum setting, seventy years later, the primitive look of these huge paintings is still unsettling. On the staircase of the Trubetskoy Palace, they must have looked excessively foreign. Besides, to imagine their impact, one must remember the social structure that went with the word "Music" in late tsarist Russia. Music pervaded the culture at every level, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg it was the social art par excellence. Against this atmosphere of social ritual, glittering and adulatory, Matisse set his image of music at its origins - enacted not by virtuosi with managers and diamond studs but by five naked cavemen, pre-historical, almost presocial. A reed flute, a crude fiddle, the slap of hand on skin: it is a long way from the world of first nights, sables, and droshkies. Yet Matisse's editing is extraordinarily powerful; in allotting each of the elements, earth, sky, and body, its own local colour and nothing more, he gives the scene a riveting presence. Within that simplicity, boundless energy is discovered. The Dance is one of the few wholly convincing images of physical ecstasy made in the twentieth century. Matisse is said to have got the idea for it in Collioure in 1905, watching some fishermen and peasants on the beach in a circular dance called a sardana. But the sardana is a stately measure, and The Dance is more intense. That circle of stamping, twisting maenads takes you back down the line, to the red-figure vases of Mediterranean antiquity and, beyond them, to the caves. It tries to represent motions as ancient as dance itself.

"The other side of this coin was an intense interest in civilized craft. Matisse loved pattern, and pattern within pattern: not only the suave and decorative forms of his own compositions but also the reproduction of tapestries, embroideries, silks, striped awnings, curlicues, mottles, dots, and spots, the bright clutter of over-furnished rooms, within the painting. In particular he loved Islamic art, and saw a big show of it in Munich on his way back from Moscow in 1911. Islamic pattern offers the illusion of a completely full world, where everything from far to near is pressed with equal urgency against the eye. Matisse admired that, and wanted to transpose it into terms of pure colour. One of the results was The Red Studio, 1911.

"On one hand, he wants to bring you into this painting: to make you fall into it, like walking through the looking-glass. Thus the box of crayons is put, like a bait, Just under your hand, as it was under his. But it is not a real space, and because it is all soaked in flat, subtly modulated red, a red beyond ordinary experience, dyeing the whole room, it describes itself aggressively as fiction. It is all inlaid pattern, full of possible "windows," but these openings are more flat surfaces. They are Matisse's own pictures. Everything else is a work of art or craft as well: the furniture, the dresser, the clock and the sculptures, which are also recognizably Matisses. The only hint of nature in all this is the trained houseplant, which obediently emulates the curve of the wicker chair on the right and the nude's body on the left. The Red Studio is a poem about how painting refers to itself: how art nourishes itself from other art and how, with enough conviction, art can form its own republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world - a paradise.

"The new Matisses, seen in the autumn of 1905, were very shocking indeed. Even their handful of defenders were uncertain about them, while their detractors thought them barbaric. Particularly offensive was his use of this discordant colour in the familiar form of the salon portrait - even though the "victim" was his wife, posing in her best Edwardian hat.

La carrière d'Henri Matisse se laisse diviser en trois périodes: de ses débuts à la Première Guerre Mondiale, de la fin de la Première Guerre Mondiale à la fin de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, de 1945 à sa mort en 1954.

À la première période correspond celle du peintre d'avant-garde, créateur et chef d'école du fauvisme que le cubisme n'allait pas tarder à détrôner. La seconde a suscité la vision d'un artiste en villégiature perpétuelle sur la Côte d'Azur, spécialiste en menus plaisirs de la rétine, élégant praticien de ce que Marcel Duchamp nommait, non sans condescendance, la peinture physique, ayant renoncé à l'aventure et obtenu, à ce prix, les suffrages d'un public bourgeois. La troisième phase, celle des gouaches découpées, qui marque un retour à l'expérimentation la plus hardie a mis à la mode depuis une douzaine d'années un Matisse figure tutélaire du formalisme abstrait.

Chacune de ces trois interprétations s'ignore au point de sembler contradictoires. Pourtant elles s'éclairent et s'accordent dès qu'on met à jour un autre facteur: celui des sujets du peintre qui est la condensation, au sein de l'œuvre, de l'horizon spirituel de l'artiste. En fait, il faudrait plutôt dire du sujet: "Vous savez, on n'a qu'une idée, on naît avec, toute une vie durant on développe son idée fixe, on la fait respirer" [rapporté par André Marchand].

Matisse situe le début de cette règle fixe dans le choix du sujet avec la création de la toile intitulée La Joie de vivre (1905). Une ample arabesque formée par les lignes et les couleurs atteste de l'intérêt naissant de l'artiste pour l'art oriental. Mais l'œuvre accuse aussi de nettes influences de la culture figurative française d'Ingres à Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin. L'emploi des couleurs pures, sans recours aux dégradés, aux valeurs, et un dessin linéaire excluant ombres et modèle est utilisé pour traiter un sujet sans précédent: celui d'une composition inventée, mythologique, une scène pastorale doublée d'une bacchanale comme en peignirent Bellini, le Titien, Poussin et Ingres. Seules activités: les plaisirs de l'amour, de la danse, de la cueillette et une sorte de degré zéro du travail.

Tous les thèmes que Matisse abordera dorénavant s'y trouvent.

L'expérience aboutit en 1909-1910 avec les deux grands panneaux "décoratifs" commandés par Serge Chtchoukine: La Danse et La Musique. Ces toiles saisissent le spectateur: la réduction extrême des moyens - trois couleurs pures, un dessin linéaire, un style simplifié, décoratif appelle le retour du thème mythique.

Puis Matisse fera "le grand bond en avant" de la peinture de chevalet a la "peinture architecturale". Il élabore un art radicalement décoratif dont la chapelle de Vence (1948-1950) et les gouaches découpées seront les exemples culminants. Cet Art tellement révolutionnaire peut paraître en rupture totale avec sa production antérieure, pourtant "Il n'y a pas de rupture entre mes anciens tableaux et mes découpages, seulement plus d'absolu, plus d'abstraction". L'objectif est de susciter un espace plus ample, une lumière plus rayonnante. L'importance grandissante que prend alors le dessin par rapport à la peinture est le préalable à l'invention d'une écriture qui est celle des lignes.

"J'ai atteint une forme décantée jusqu'à l'essentiel, et j'ai conservé de l'objet, que je présentais autrefois dans la complexité de son espace, le signe qui suffit et qui est nécessaire à le faire exister dans sa forme propre et pour l'ensemble dans lequel je l'ai conçu. Il s'agit pour moi d'une simplification: le papier découpé me permet de dessiner dans la couleur."

Sources: Texte de Arnaud Maréchal, d'après Pierre Schneider.

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