Matisse with Maurice Rummens

The Stedelijk Museum is pleased to invite you to the special series of Gallery Talks given by the experts behind the exhibition The Oasis of Matisse, on view from March 27 to August 16, 2015. During the tours the speakers will discuss a selection of artworks on the basis of their own areas of expertise, research, or interest. This way, the Stedelijk Museum provides room for new and – above all – personal reflections on the paintings and drawings in the exhibition.

All the speakers are part of the team of curators of the Stedelijk Museum and are involved in the exhibition as researchers or co-curators: trainee curator Ceciel Stoutjesdijk specializes in modern art, assistant curator Suzanna Héman made a selection of the most beautiful prints and drawings from the museum collection for the exhibition, paper restorer Tessa Rietveld contributed to important reports on both the condition of the works in the collection and on the loans to the exhibition, and academic researcher Maurice Rummens is the expert on Matisse in the Stedelijk Museum and wrote for the catalogue.

About the exhibition the oasis of matisse 

The Oasis of Matisse is the largest exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse that has ever been put on in the Netherlands. Furthermore, with more than 100 works it is one of the largest exhibitions in the history of the Stedelijk. The French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) depicted (Eastern) nudes, fabrics, carpets, potted plants, and idyllic landscapes looking for the most perfect possible correspondence between color and form. The exhibition shows how throughout his life Matisse worked on creating a light, cheerful, and carefree atmosphere with minimal means: the Oasis of Matisse.

More about the speaker 

Maurice Rummens is an academic researcher for the Stedelijk Museum and has carried out research for the Matisse exhibition and the catalogue. He wrote two essays for the exhibition catalogue The Oasis of Matisse, including Matisse en de Verleiding van het Decoratieve (Matisse and the Temptation of the Decorative). In the Stedelijk Museum Rummens is the expert on the subject of Matisse and decorative stencils in the visual arts; he gained his doctorate at the University of Utrecht under Professor Evert van Uitert on De verleiding van het decoratieve. Twee opstellen over compositie, expressie en abstractie in de theorie en praktijk van de moderne schilderkunst (The temptation of the decorative. Two essays on composition, expression and abstraction in the theory and practice of modern painting). Rummens has been an academic employee at the Stedelijk Museum since 1999, and has contributed to publications such as Acquisitions 1993-2003 (2006), Stedelijk Collection Highlights (2012), and Stedelijk Collection Reflections (2012) as well as exhibitions such as Bissière (2000) and Kirchner (2002).