Fruits

In the fall of 1964, the French Embassy and the Smithsonian Institution organized a traveling exhibition to celebrate one of the most consequential print studios in the history of Western art: Mourlot Frères, Paris. To mark the occasion they produced a limited edition catalog — 2,200 copies total, printed on velin d'Arches paper — and inside it, bound alongside original lithographs by Picasso, Chagall, Miró, Calder, Giacometti, and Cocteau, was this: a lithograph by Henri Matisse, titled Fruits.

Fruits is that print, separated from its catalog and framed. Which means what you are looking at is an original lithograph produced by the most celebrated print studio of the 20th century, in an edition that traveled the museums of America under the joint authority of France and the Smithsonian, in the company of virtually every major name in postwar European art. Unsigned and unnumbered as issued — this was standard for the edition, not an exception — and printed with the precision that made Mourlot Frères the destination for any painter who wanted to understand what lithography could do. Matisse himself had been a collaborator with the studio for decades, and it was largely at his urging that Picasso first walked through Mourlot's door.

The composition is Matisse at his most distilled: pure color, fluid line, form built from the inside out rather than drawn from the outside in. Fruit as form. Color as structure. Simplicity as the result of enormous discipline rather than its absence. Matisse spent his entire career arriving at this quality of mark — the cut-outs, the late works, the gouaches — and Fruits sits squarely in that late visual language, where everything unnecessary has been removed and what remains is completely alive.

The toning to the sheet is light and even, consistent with sixty years of existing in the world. The ornate gold frame holds it with the ceremony the provenance deserves. The COA accompanies it.