Curator, Ann Temkin: Matisse had recently moved to the beautiful Mediterranean when he made this picture. You see it outside the window with that spectacular blue of both sea and sky. Matisse gives the interior of that violin case that same rich blue, and it's almost like the freedom and the sense of potential that Matisse found in blue sky, blue water, he found in that blue violin case.
The 20th century was a period of a lot of social change, and that sense of liberty, that sense of self-expression, for these artists, for the people who collected that art, was certainly allied with new ways of independence from tradition.
Curator, Romy Silver-Kohn: I think art is where Lillie found freedom in her life. She wasn't afraid of things that were new. She embraced them and ended up kind of fighting for them. She felt very strongly that viewers should have open minds and look carefully.
Writer, Kate Walbert: At one point, there was a critical response to the pictures that she loved, and she wrote a letter to Louis Tiffany, on of the critics, in which she excoriated him. It goes like this:
“You are an artist absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to...discriminate between what is false and bad, and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise.”
Romy Silver-Kohn: She wanted artists to have freedom to make these things that “were full of power and promise” because I think she was looking for that herself.