Henri Matisse, “Reclining Nude I (Aurore),” circa 1907-1908, bronze, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.

The Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center have partnered to present the first major exhibition in more than two decades to explore Henri Matisse’s sculptural works.

“Matisse: Painter as Sculptor” will examine the artist’s sculpture as a vital part of a multifaceted conversation among the different media in his work and will reach farther than any before to highlight Matisse’s achievements as a sculptor. Featuring more than 150 sculptures, paintings and drawings, as well as photographs of the artist at work, the exhibition will present new insight into Matisse’s creative process and will contextualize his achievement through comparative works of other modern masters.

Organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center and The Baltimore Museum of Art, “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor” will be on view concurrently at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center from January 21 through April 29, with each institution displaying different sections of the exhibition. Following the Dallas presentation, the exhibition will travel to San Francisco and Baltimore.

“‘Matisse: Painter as Sculptor’ is representative of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center’s commitment to the study of early Modernism and marks the first time that we, as neighboring institutions, have partnered together on an exhibition,” said John R. Lane, The Eugene McDermott director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and Steven A. Nash, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center. “This unique collaboration sets a precedent for future institutional partnerships among the network of North Texas museums, further establishing the Dallas-Fort Worth area as a leading center for the study and appreciation of modern and contemporary art.”

The exhibit is organized thematically around a core group of more than 40 of Matisse’s great sculptural masterworks, which will be complemented with a selection of related works on paper, paintings and original photographs of the artist at work. These integrated groupings will help to illuminate the evolution of Matisse’s sculptural ideas and creative process and reveal the dialogue between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional in his oeuvre.

For instance, the bronze sculpture “Reclining Nude I (Aurora),” 1907, will be exhibited alongside the majestic painting “Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra,” 1907, a canvas that Matisse was painting during a key and difficult moment in the modeling of the sculpture. The painted and sculpted representations of the reclining female nude evolved together and were inextricably linked.

Other exhibition highlights include the bronze sculptures “Madeleine I” and “Madeleine II,” 1901 and 1903, the five portrait busts of “Jeannette,” 1910-1914. and the monumental series of four bronze reliefs known as “The Backs,” 1909-1930, Matisse’s most sustained exploration of the reduction and abstraction of the human form.

Select works by Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin, among other modern masters, will contextualize Matisse’s work, his dialogue with the figurative tradition and the radical nature of his sculpture in the history of modern art.

The exhibition will present groundbreaking technical research that sheds light on Matisse’s sculptural process, both in the studio and in the foundry and on the slight variations in scale and form of his great works in series. Comparative studies of specific sculptures were made using a laser scanning process, which allows for minute comparisons of different casts of the same work of art (for instance, Matisse’s “Madeleine I” and “Madeleine II”).

These scans have been transformed into animated, interactive computer models that will be featured in the exhibition, offering visitors a better sense of how Matisse worked from one sculpture to another in a series and how he approached the casting of his sculptures in bronze. The project reflects active research on sculpture conservation and the technical aspects of sculpture at the Nasher Sculpture Center and The Baltimore Museum of Art.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalog, co-produced with Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.

The Dallas Museum of Art is at 1717 North Harwood. For information, www.dallasmuseumofart.org or 214-922-1200. The Nasher Sculpture Center is at 2001 Flora Street adjacent to the museum. For information, www.nashersculpturecenter.org or 214-242-5100.