Bonheur de Vivre

Bonheur de Vivre is the result of long-held desire by Bernard Jacobson to present work by some of the great artists who have particularly inspired and sustained his own love of modern art throughout a long and distinguished career as a gallerist. The exhibition is an unalloyed celebration of beauty, joy, colour, and light. Beginning with Henri Matisse, it traces the revolution in art that sprang from Le Bonheur de Vivre and the inspiration it proved to artists including Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, and Robert Motherwell, selected important works of which are included in Bonheur de Vivre.

Matisse is represented with three remarkable, light-filled paintings of single female sitters, all originating from his long working sojourn in the South of France: Jeune fille à la mauresque, robe verte (1921), Nu au peignoir (1933), and Jeune femme assise en robe grise (1942). In the apparent simplicity of these three paintings, Matisse fully demonstrates his virtuosity, both by the fluidity of line which captures the youth and supple grace of his sitters and by the brilliance of pictorial light, so redolent of the South of France, created by the juxtaposition of one intense hue against another.

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