Anrī Matiss un latviešu māksla
Henri Matisse and Latvian Art

Summary/Abstract: In autumn 2005 the Foreign Art Museum in Riga exhibited an excellent collection of works by Matisse from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.Apart from the purely aesthetic pleasure it raised the question of his place in the history of Latvian art. Despite the fact that in Latvia there was no stable circle of followers comparable, for instance, with the German School of Matisse, Latvian artists proved to have a surprisingly enduring interest in the ouevre of the French master. Some of his works were exhibited already in 1910 in Riga and the first promoter of Modernism in Latvia, Voldemārs Matvejs, presented Matisse as one of its paradigms. The first Latvian painter whose early style was unmistakably dependent on Matisse's paintings seen in Moscow in 1916-1917 was Ģederts Eliass.He not only constructed bright, colourful compositions with the same iconography (lazy figures of models, ornamental dresses, fragments of interior settings) but also used the bright colour ranges representing more random and ordinary motifs derived from his surroundings ("Woman with Pink Stockings", c. 1920; "Two Women in a Room", 1916-1920, both in the Je1gava Museum of History and Art). Later Eliass drew away from Matisse but continued to hold him in great esteem: in a book written together with his brother art historian Kristaps Eliass, he praised Matisse's works as a new era in the history of painting. In the course of the 1930s some young artists from the so-calledTukums Group tried to revive the concept of early Modernism related to the Fauves and Matisse. As a result, Kārlis Neilis developed his individual intimate style uniting brilliant colour areas with some effects of plein-air light ("Nude", 1942, Tukums Museum). Later, as an emigre in Austria, he took up more abstract style but preserved his commitment to the use of decorative colourfields. The tradition of Matisse was hindered during the 1940s and the first half of 1950s due to political factors. During the first decade of the Soviet occupation Matisse, as well as other French modernist artists, were seen by the guardians of the official ideology as formalists and products of bourgeois decadence. In the years of the so-called thaw and later, when the totalitarian regime became less repressive and the trend of Social Realism in art was modernised, a second "discovery" of Matisse was possible. Now, nothing endangered his reputation in the circles of Latvian artists and art historians. A devotee of the Fauves was Leonīds Āriņš - an outsider in the time of Soviets who kept alive the tradition of the Tukums Group. His credo that the main element in painting - colour - is a vehicle for expressing emotional experience is analogous to the well known definitions of painting coined by Matisse. More ambitious, monumental and full of pathos was another Latvian "Frenchman" - Rūdolfs Pinnis who lived in Paris in the 1930s. Other followers include Ilze Avotiņa, Helēna Heinrihsone, Ērika Gulbe, Laimonis Mieri

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