NEW YORK, NY.- Tilton Gallery announced that Jackie Matisse passed away peacefully at home on May 17, 2021. She leaves a glorious legacy of artworks that float and fly, exploring the freedom of shape, material, and color in motion and at rest. Flexible and unpredictable, developed in collaboration with the elements of nature, her art evades conventional markers of permanence, authority, or importance. While in no way autobiographical, Jackie’s lifetime of work balances gentleness and strength with the same grace as its creator.
Jackie was born in 1931 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, daughter of the art dealer Pierre Matisse and his wife Alexina Sattler Matisse. The family soon moved to New York City, where Pierre would establish an eponymous art gallery. The eldest of three children (brothers Paul and Peter), Jackie grew up in New York and New Jersey and attended the Brearley School. At a young age she was plunged into the artistic milieu centered on her father’s gallery, including the many European artists exiled in New York City during World War II (she performed in Hans Richter’s 1952 film 8 x 8, with Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Alexander Calder, and others). Jackie did not, however, intend to become an artist; in 1949 she had gone to Paris to study literature at the Sorbonne. In 1954 her mother married Marcel Duchamp, further intensifying the remarkable art historical legacy that family ties brought to Jackie and her siblings. Later that same year Jackie married Bernard Monnier, with whom she had four children: Robert, Caty, Antoine, and Nicolas.
When the children were still very young, she worked for Duchamp assembling editions of the Box in a Valise; she joined this endeavor in 1959 and continued until Duchamp’s death in 1968. In 1962 she began her own career as an artist with the making of kites, following an epiphany as she watched a kite flying over the buildings in Harlem a few years earlier. In 1970 she was one of seven signatories to the manifesto of “Art Volant,” which declared the kite to be “a vehicle which speaks of the joining of the spirit and the physical.” In the words of the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, “her kites signal a spirit of profound attentiveness to our environment, a joy in our natural surroundings that is at once ancient and contemporary.” Jackie’s works for sky and sea share a common vocabulary with a wide range of constructions that were made for contained spaces but nonetheless provided the same sense of boundlessness. These traverse a full range of scale: colorful bits and pieces are suspended from a human hair in a tabletop wire enclosure, billowing trails of patterned fabric populate a stage.
Expansive collaboration with fellow artists in a variety of mediums was central to Jackie’s creative philosophy. This is vividly seen in Sea Tails, 1983, made together with her dear friends, composer David Tudor and filmmaker Molly Davies. A beautifully structured six-monitor, six-channel installation work marries footage of kites moving through the ocean with a score of underwater sounds collected at the same time and place. Jackie’s many other close artistic partners over the years include Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Ecke Bonk. Collaboration became an open-ended invitation to all with Kites Flying In and Out of Space (2002-2005), an interactive work for which Jackie and an international team of computer scientists devised technology allowing anyone to fly simulated kites in virtual space.
Jackie first exhibited her work with 9 Kite Tails at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas in Paris in 1972. Since then, her many exhibitions in Europe and the United States include Kitetail Cocktail in 1999 at the The Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Art that Soars: Kites and Tails by Jackie Matisse at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego in 2000 and Jackie Matisse: Jeux d’Espace at the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in 2013.
In the mid-1980s she began to work closely with Teeny Duchamp to organize and preserve the archives of Marcel Duchamp. Jackie’s commitment to this work continued after Teeny’s death in 1995, and it is in no small part thanks to her support that Duchamp scholarship expanded and thrived over recent decades. That mission is carried on today under the auspices of the Association Marcel Duchamp.
Contributions in Jackie’s memory may be sent to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
