January 31 through March 23, 2002
Opening Reception, Thursday, January 31, 6 – 8 pm
Loren MacIver was only thirty years old when Pierre Matisse began to exhibit and represent her work in a relationship that lasted fifty years—until his death and the close of his gallery in 1989. The current exhibition surveys paintings and drawings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, included in her first New York gallery exhibitions.
During this period MacIver developed her uniquely personal and poetic style of representation through subjects often drawn from the smallest details of her everyday life on Cape Cod and in Key West and New York. Beach grass, wild flowers and buildings of New York’s Greenwich Village are each imbued with freshness, immediacy, and a magical sense of fun. The poet Elizabeth Bishop referred to the marvelous “out-of-focus dream detail” in MacIver’s visual poems, and to their “divine myopia.”
Excerpt from Pierre Matisse’s original press release, 1940:
Miss MacIver has never worked or studied abroad. What academic training she received was at a very early age, at the Art Students League. Although quite young, she has already sold two pictures at different periods to the Museum of Modern Art. “Hopscotch” was recently bought by the Modern Museum through the Rockefeller Fund, and is included in their current exhibition, “Selections from the Museum’s Collection of Painting and Sculpture.” “The Shack” was acquired by the Museum several years ago. The latter picture has also the distinction of having been sent by the Modern Museum to the Jeu de Paume exhibition in Paris in 1938, and exhibited in the all-American group on that occasion. The Modern Museum also exhibited work by the artists in a show labeled, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” in 1936, and in this show Miss MacIver’s work was classified under fantasy.
The present show at the Matisse Gallery, abstract in its method of expression continues in this vein. Many of the pictures were painted during the past two years, in Key West, a place Miss MacIver finds very useful for her kind of painting. Its sketchy architecture and its poverty, bathed in shimmering light, have an abstract quality; but the people display talents for fantastic decoration in details of houses and yards. Miss MacIver is particularly fond of one of their devices of painting polka dots on flower poets, tabourets, etc., and in several pictures she has extended the use of the polka dot to give the feeling of the atmosphere itself.
This exhibition is organized to coincide with the exhibition, “Pierre Matisse and His Artists,” which opens at the Pierpont Morgan Library February 14, 2002.
For further information and visuals, contact the gallery: 212.755.2828.
