MATISSE AND THE RELIGION OF ART

When approaching eighty years of age, artist Henri Matisse embarked on a project to build a chapel in the French region of the Alpes Maritimes with a Dominican friar. The undertaking generates resistance among various artists and religious individuals, concerned with the contamination of avant-garde art by Catholic conservatism and the modernist desecration of sacred art, respectively. In this paper, I analyze the construction of the Chapel of the Rosary (1947-1951) as a key case to explore the effects of the consortium between art and religion promoted by Matisse on two simultaneous and complementary levels. In the first, I investigate how the composition between religious and artistic vocabularies and practices enhances the construction of Matisse’s work, generating repercussions in the artist’s own life. In the second, I examine how this association produces a tension between the modern and secular principle of separation between the art and religion spheres, illuminating the terms of this separation. The path taken through field research in France and the analysis of different documentary sources reveals that religion (be it Catholicism, diffuse spiritualism or other sacred manifestations) acquires the status of an articulating procedure throughout which the artist constructs his work, and, through it, himself.

Keywords:
Art sacralization; Religion; Avant-garde; Secularization; Matisse