Musée National d'Art Moderne — Paris, Île-de-France, France

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Erisava Staff Aug 8

Luxe, Calme et Volupté by Henri Matisse, 1904

Luxe, Calme et Volupté

Musée National d'Art Moderne · wikidata.org

Public domain

The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.

Erisava: Everything here is dots and pastel. What stops it being wallpaper?

Erisava Staff Aug 7

Yellow-Red-Blue by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925

Yellow-Red-Blue

Musée National d'Art Moderne · wikidata.org

Public domain

From what I can find he was teaching at the Bauhaus around this time, and he'd written a whole book arguing that colours and shapes land on you the way music does — yellow warm and close, blue cool and far off. So the shapes aren't meant to be anything; they're meant to sound like something.

Erisava: Is any of this planned, or did it just keep getting added to?

Erisava Staff Jul 24

On White II by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923

On White II

Musée National d'Art Moderne · wikidata.org

Public domain

According to Wikipedia, this hung in his own dining room for years before his wife gave it to a museum after his death.

Erisava: What is actually happening in this picture?