Nine Things You Need To Know: Bonheur De Vivre At Bernard Jacobson Gallery

From today until May 27th, Bernard Jacobson Gallery plays host to an all-star exhibition Bonheur de Vivre, an exhibition of 16 works by some of the greatest masters of the twentieth century. Here's what you need to know about it.

1) The exhibition is titled after the seminal Henri Matisse painting Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905-06).

2) 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.

3) 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.

4) 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)

5) The connection between Joan Miró and Matisse is both stylistic and familial, with Henri’s youngest son Pierre representing Miró from the outset of his career through his influential and eponymous New York Gallery; two of the four works by Miró on show here were first exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.

6) Alexander Calder, the artist who made enchantment his credo, stated “Above all, art should be happy and not lugubrious”. He could not have provided a better description of the three sculptures included in Bonheur de Vivre; two hanging mobiles, Blue Flower, Perforated Red (1960) and Sans titre (1947) and one standing mobile, Petit Mobile sur Pied (1955).

7) In Calder’s work, christened mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, colour and line is animated, made kinetic and liberated from the fixed pedestal - his mobiles sing with invention and are amongst the first three dimensional abstract art works to feature movement.

8) The paintings of Sam Francis, particularly those referred to as ‘open paintings’ also explore space, light and colour in a bold and original manner and are represented here with two paintings; Untitled (1959) and EV (1970). In these luminous works, the artist’s own concoction of dyes mixed in transparent acrylic medium, applied through glazes and washes feature abstract shapes which seem to dance and revolve around the ‘empty centre

9) The final selection for Bonheur de Vivre takes us back full circle to Matisse with an artist who said that seeing his first Matisse “shot him to his heart like an arrow” and titled an early collage Joy of Living in homage. Robert Motherwell plays with abstraction, colour and texture as animating forces of playful lightness and invention displayed here with two collages; U.S. Art New York N.Y (1959) - a title taken from the label attached to the paper wrapping for U.S. Art Canvas Company - and Sacre du Printemps (1975) which features a sheet of music from Stravinsky’s score.

Bernard Jacobson Gallery 28 Duke Street St. James's London SW1Y 6AG Tel +44 (0)20 7734 3431 Fax +44 (0)20 7734 3277