Art
MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE SCHOOL OF PARIS
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, through June 3We tend to associate artists with defining—and often early—periods in their careers. That kind of pigeonholing can be helpful if you’re talking about, say, the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker, who checked out at 34. But human lives and artistic energies usually last longer. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso had careers that spanned decades, starting around 1900 and ending with their deaths in 1954 and 1973, respectively. During those years, they were the world’s preeminent artists, and they were also rivals.
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ recently opened show of French art from the Baltimore Museum of Art captures the artistic lives of these two giants and positions them in the context of 60 years of French art. In addition to bringing a slew of pieces from one of Western art’s most fertile periods, the show proves the impact passionate and engaged collectors can have by assembling collections the public eventually enjoys.
Fine Lines Henri Matisse, “Rumanian Blouse.” The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection
The pieces in this exhibit are largely drawn from the collection of two sisters, Etta and Dr. Claribel Cone. They came from a wealthy Baltimore family who owned the Cone Mills in Greensboro, N.C. Neither married, leaving them free to collect art. In 1906, they met Matisse and Picasso and started buying from them. Moreover, the sisters were friends of the writer Gertrude Stein and her brother, who were Baltimoreans, and through them they expanded their artistic contacts and acquired additional work. The collection grew until Etta’s death in 1949, when it went to the BMA. The museum supplemented the collection with works acquired by other donors and its own acquisition funds, ending up with a remarkably complete picture of this artistic epoch.
The exhibit centers on Matisse. The Cone sisters collected Matisse deeply and gave the museum over 500 works by him. This show includes six Matisse oil paintings, four drawings, two lithographs and two small sculptures. Picasso lost the sisters’ interest when he turned to Cubism and is represented here mostly by early work from 1905 and 1906. The exhibit also includes works by artists who came both before and after Matisse and Picasso. Together, these artists made up the School of Paris, which dominated the art world from the late 19th century to around 1950.
The Matisse paintings lent for this show concentrate on the middle of his career, pieces from the 1920s bookended by one from 1917 and one from 1937. Matisse’s appeal lies in both his lines and colors. Simple, sensuous lines trace the curve of clothing or drape the edges of a face or fingers. In a drawing such as “Rumanian Blouse” he could create an appealing work through simple line drawing, no shading whatsoever. In his paintings, he latched onto linear patterns in floor tiles, wallpaper, clothing and upholstery.
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Matisse’s works brim with tropical colors stacked together: lots of intense red, yellow and green. He described his method as “simply trying to lay in colors that express my sensation.” That sensation tended toward the rich, luxurious sensory experience he remembered from trips to Morocco.
Even with its immediate sensory appeal, Matisse’s work had radical qualities. Although he painted familiar interior scenes and lovely female models, his compositions are flat in ways that tend toward abstraction. Four of these paintings have diamond patterns on the floor, but the diamonds don’t get smaller as they go into the distance, which removes the illusion of perspective and brings the background onto the same vertical plane as the foreground. In “Still Life, Bouquet of Dahlias and White Book,” the flowers on the table are as two-dimensional as the flowers in the wallpaper. This extreme flatness creates a realm of pure painting where color and line interact for their own purposes.
The show offers a less representative selection of Picassos. The most fully realized work is a sad-eyed portrait, “Woman With Bangs,” from his “Blue Period.” There are also studies for two major works from 1905 and a charming cartoon he did for Etta Cone, a humorous self-portrait. The most revealing piece is a pen-and-ink self-portrait from 1906 that shows the strong influence of African masks in the simple ovoid shape of the head and its blackened eyes. These African overtones shaped his landmark painting from the next year, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” which violated the sensibilities of the art world in much the same way that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring stunned the music world.
No Perspective Henri Matisse, “Still Life, Bouquet of Dahlias and White Book”
The first part of the exhibit shows what came before Matisse and Picasso. The predecessors include van Gogh, represented here by a landscape in his late style with short, heavy, parallel brushstrokes, and Paul Cezanne, whose view of Mount Sainte-Victoire builds up the image from blocks of color. Both of these styles rely on juxtaposition of color and line in ways that prefigure Matisse. The intense ruby red in Pierre Bonnard’s interior scene is nearly as vibrant as the ones Matisse used, and the strong, simple lines of an Edgar Degas drawing are good preparation for Matisse’s almost calligraphic hand.
Matisse concentrated on domestic scenes and recurring images—for instance, paintings from different decades include a silver tray with lemons, oranges and a glass of water. It reminds you of Dutch still life, where a painter would use the same glass from his studio in multiple works. The content itself matters little, just the sensations conveyed by Matisse’s color and line compositions. That’s remarkable when you think about everything going on at the time. Matisse painted “Purple Robe and Anemones” in 1937, the same year as Picasso’s wrenching memorial of the Spanish Civil War, “Guernica.”
Feeling Blue Pablo Picasso, “Woman with Bangs”
By contrast, the problems of the day come out in pieces here by the younger artists. Surrealist Andre Masson’s gripping “In the Tower of Sleep” shows a figure stripped of skin caught in a harp that has turned into a sharp-toothed trap. Diabolic creatures abuse other instruments in a chaotic scene with echoes of 18th century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s dungeons. A second Masson work, “Ophelia,” has a contrasting color scheme, all yellows and greens, but Polonius’ daughter lies drowned in the foreground. These images of violence and death come from 1937 and 1938, when Hitler was marching into Austria and the Sudetenland.
This show is certainly about Matisse and the painters of his time, but it is also significantly about the women who collected the paintings. Nashville might take a couple of lessons from the Cones. One is that we are late to the game of collecting art, that we didn’t have people with the vision or money to buy this quality of art when you could get it. The more positive spin is that the opportunity is always there for collectors to get in on the ground floor. The Cones were too late to collect the 19th century Impressionists, so they found what was happening in their own time. Perhaps someone in Nashville has started buying art by young Chinese artists, or the circle of painters in Leipzig, or members of the African diaspora. We can talk about community, but there’s no getting around the connection between art and individual wealth, taste and vision.