Matisse’s La Danse: On the Semantics of the Surface in Modern Painting

• Authors: Otten Holger
• Languages of publication: DE

Abstracts

EN

Since in Modernism inner meaning is doubted or believed lost, the question arises of what an interpretation ignoring the established dialectics of outside and inside and limiting itself to an exclusive surface would look like. Henri Matisse's decorations raise questions about the differences between figure and background, appearance and essence, inside and outside. Instead of reference to depth under the surface, it is density and expansion, concentration and contraction, which determine the occurrence of meaning on the surface. Matisse presents himself as a flaneur of the surface, as if he wanted to show us, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, that '(i)t is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the corporeal'.

Keywords

EN

MATISSE HENRI; MODERNISM; SURFACE

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 173-183
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Otten Holger

• Holger Otten, University of Cologne, Germany, http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/3279/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09CZAAAA06267