Paintings From the Family of Matisse Donated to MAM, Paris

Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris has just received a donation of 61 works by Henri Matisse. 

 

The gift includes paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs and a sculpture. Many of the works feature Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, who often modeled for her father and helped him in his studio.

 

 

In 1984, Matisse was studying art in Paris. He had a relationship with model, Caroline Joblau. Marguerite was the product of that relationship.

 

Matisse married Amélie Parayre in 1898. They raised Marguerite from the time she was four, along with their two sons.

 

Marguerite was active in the French Resistance during World War ll. She was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and put on a train that was to take her to the  concentration camp in Ravensbrück. The train was stopped during a bomb attack by Allied Forces and Marguerite managed to escape.

 

In 1923 she married the art critic Georges Duthuit, whom she had met during his military leave in Issy. The couple had a son, Claude Duthuit  (1931-2011), who often sat as a model for his grandfather.

 

“My parents left France for a few years, and my grandfather didn’t think it was a proper thing for a child four or five years old to be bounced around.” Claude said in an interview for the Jewish Museum, about six months before his death in 2011. “Actually, [he and my grandmother] wanted to have me with them. So I was raised by my grandparents in Nice for about three or four years. So of course my grandfather and my grandmother had a special attachment to me, as I was attached to them. And then later on, I was more available because my mother and my grandfather kept a close relationship. They always collaborated."

 

The donated works, many of which are of Marguerite and had been kept by the family, were donated to the museum by Claude’s widow, Barbara Duthuit.

 

Matisse used bold colors and simple forms in his paintings. In 1941, after an illness and surgery confined him to a wheelchair, he began to make colorful collages, using bold colors and simple forms in a new and masterful way.

 

This style is reflected in White Alga On Red and Green Ground and other works by Henri Matisse available at VFA. 

 

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Alpha Centuri Kid (ACK) (b.1986) began painting in oils at his San Antonio, Texas high school. He also began playing piano at an early age.

 

The piano became a muse…not just the music, but the keys and other components of the piano itself.

 

While working for the Department of Homeland Security, ACK let his muse guide him and, in 2021,  he began using digital and 3D software to create digital and physical works.

He built the Grand Skull Piano, from a Steinway, which was played by pianist Olga Kern at Carnegie Hall last year. 

 

ACK’s focus on the piano continues, with Heavy Mettle, a work on canvas, available at VFA.

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Henri Matisse and ACK available at VFA.

 

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January 8, 2026