- Title
- La Gerbe
- Date Made
- 1953
- Medium
- Ceramic tile embedded in plaster
- Dimensions
- 119 3/8 × 142 1/8 in. (303.21 × 361 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2010.1
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
In the last years of his life, Henri Matisse was commissioned by collectors Sidney and Frances Brody to create a ceramic wall work for their A. Quincy Jones−designed home in Los Angeles. Color was the key focus of Matisse’s art—decorative in conception and emotionally expressive; his goal was to produce “an art of balance, of purity and serenity.” If Matisse’s Fauve works (beginning in 1905) are understood as a dialogue between color and line, his last works—the so-called gouaches découpées, or cut gouaches—stand as a summation of his intentions. La Gerbe, executed in ceramic, is Matisse’s only West Coast commission. It is based on a paper cutout of the same title in the Grunwald Center Collection, Hammer Museum, UCLA.
Stephanie Barron
- Selected Bibliography
- Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.
- Jayne, Thomas with Anne Walker. The Finest Tea Rooms in America: Fifty Influential Interiors from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. New York: The Monacelli Press, 2010.
- Aloi, Giovanni. Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2025.
- Copyright
- © Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
