The Engine

Matisse: Cut Outs: Tate Modern: London: August 2014   Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) cut outs are pictorial icons of the Twentieth-Century avant-garde but this exhibition explains their evolution in terms of the context of Matisse’s ageing and declining health. In a sense Matisse’s rejection of painting was an aesthetic choice but since he was primarily a realist painter cut outs offered Matisse a new direction. Obviously they allowed him to re-assemble his images, to test out the composition, allowing him to re-establish his images and their contexts. However, cut outs were also a practical response to the artist’s loss of mobility which had been caused by a colostomy, (a medical cut out). Matisse found novel ways of overcoming declining health and immobility. Yet Matisse, the great rival of Picasso and along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp a key innovator in modern art, was creatively vital and energetic to the very end of his life.   Matisse’s initial attempts at cut outs (Matisse

KASIMIR MALEVICH AT THE TATE MODERN  Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1879 to Polish parents, Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) could hardly be said to be Russian so unsurprisingly his initial attempts at art sought to establish his personal surroundings and then his”Russian” identity. Malevich lived through a time of incredible turmoil and rapid change in Russia. The serfs had only just been emancipated in 1861, a liberal constitution was still a dream and an ineffectual Duma (Parliament) largely served the Tsar's interests. Opponents of autocracy included Liberals, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and Anarchists. Some of these groups had indeed given up democratic politics in the face of intense repression on the part of the Tsarist regime and had begun to embrace political violence and assassination as legitimate forms of dissent. Malevich represented a new class of artist revolutionaries who were rapidly outpacing both anti and pro democracy groupings. He recognised that his task w