‘Matisse: Painter As Sculptor’ At Baltimore Museum Of Art

Baltimore, Md.

:Revered, along with Picasso, as a great pioneer of Modern art, Henri Matisse utilized radical innovations in his influential paintings and sculptures. His mastery of painted works — and cutouts — is well known. A new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) confirms his extraordinary gifts as creator of three-dimensional objects.

In works of all kinds, Matisse (1869–1954) pushed the medium beyond the ordinary, celebrating the joie de vivre , and in the process helped put avant-garde art on the map. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, whose subjects often reflected the anxiety, alienation and random violence of modern life, Matisse's essential subject was the joy of life, reflected in his earliest Fauve period paintings and sculptures, created around the turn of the century, to the last cutouts produced just before his death.

"Matisse: Painter as Sculptor," the first Matisse sculpture exhibition in more than two decades, was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center (where it opened in January), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the BMA, where it is on view through February 3.

This fascinating exhibition features more than 160 sculptures, paintings, drawings and archival photographs that underscore the artist's inventiveness, the dialogue between his two- and three-dimensional works and his contributions to the evolution of Modern art.

Drawing on its own rich holdings, the BMA exhibition includes complementary works by such contemporary artists as Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cezanne, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin that place Matisse's sculpture in context. As BMA director Doreen Bolger declared, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Matisse's genius represented in bronze, on canvas and on paper with works from around the world."

Born in northern France, Matisse studied law at the University of Paris, but he said he "had no desire to visit any of the great museums, or even the annual salons of painting." At the age of 20, however, bored by clerking in a law firm and while recuperating from an attack of appendicitis, he began fiddling around with painting and found his calling.

After four years of academic training in Paris with Adolphe William Bouguereau at the Academie Julian and with Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, he began painting with a dark, Old Masters palette. Soon he converted to brighter, even violent hues and distorted compositions that made him a leader among the more adventurous young painters in the city. He and his fellow Fauvists ("wild beasts"), such as Derain, Roualt and Vlaminck, shocked the public with their shrill colors and unconventional shapes.

He married in 1898 and eventually had two boys, but struggled for a decade before earning a comfortable income. His first significant sale — the brightly painted "Woman With the Hat," 1905 — was to the family of American expatriate/salon hostess Gertrude Stein. As critic Clement Greenberg once wrote of Matisse, "Like Picasso, he had to wait until the boom in Modern art in the 1920s to become a rich man."

Before 1945, much of his work was bought by Germans, Russians and Americans. Hans Hofmann, the German-born painter and teacher, promoted Matisse's art in the United States, and Dr Albert Barnes was a substantial collector and advocate. In 1933, Matisse visited the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Penn., to supervise installation of his celebrated mural, "The Dance." The most important collectors of Matisse sculptures were Claribel and Etta Cone; the Cone collection at the BMA has been a rich source for Matisse aficionados and scholars for years.