Viewing page 31 of 59
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
Art/Barbara Rose MATISSE THE MASTER "... The erotic quality is the essence of his sculpture, whose sensuous surfaces seem to demand that we touch them ..." After carping about the identity crisis at the Museum of Modern Art, I am happy to report it appears the MOMA is finally ready to accept itself as a middle-aged institution and relinquish the pursuit of youthful novelties for the stability of the tried and true. The first sign of the new mature spirit was the excellent show of Picasso's works from the Museum's own permanent collection. Now to complement Picasso's paintings, there is an exhibition of Matisse's sculpture (thru 5/1), yet another indication of the MOMA's rededication to its original goals. It may seem strange to have to say this, but there's nothing like great art to make a great museum. So much trivia has taken up museum resources recently - which simply alienates a public that rightly senses something fishy about piles of untransformed materials labeled as art - that the work of the great masters stands out from such mediocrity in even greater relief. For the current Matisse exhibition, MOMA associate curator Alicia Legg has assembled, for the first time, all 69 of Matisse's bronze sculptures, and installed them handsomely and intelligently, with an eye to both the way a work is seen in the round, as well as to its historical context. For example, works which were executed in sequence, like the relief of a female nude titled Back of which Matisse made four revised versions, are grouped together to show their development. In Matisse's progressive reformulations of the theme, executed between 1909 and 1930, of sees the original chunky nude gradually translated into pure abstract form in which the subject is finally scarcely recognizable. This was, of course, Matisse's typical procedure. Beginning with studies from nature, he gradually refined the subject so that the esthetic dominated the real - sometimes to the point where the original model appears entirely lost. Allowing the general public to be able to follow these sequential transformations, from reality to abstraction, such groupings provide an exemplary object lesson in the method, not only of Matisse, but also of the majority of modern artists, for whom reality was merely a point of departure. [[Image]] The Back, II (1913) Matisse's progressive distortions, however, are unlike those of Expressionist art in that his alterations of natural appearances are not made in the name of projection angst, but toward the end of achieving greater formal purity through distillation. As opposed to the dark mood of Expressionism, the spirit of Matisses's sculpture, like the color-and-light-drenched world of his paintings, is one of delectation, a voluptuous enjoyment of the human body (all of Matisses's sculpture are figures or heads), and its softly rounded curves and hollows. It is significant that many of Matisses's sculptures are variations on the theme of the Odalisque, the reclining nude who lounges luxuriously on her side, one leg draped over the other, an arm raised in provocative gesture behind her head to balance the curve of the leg. These ladies, like Ingres's bathers, are obviously waiting for an amorous approach. The erotic quality of Matisse's sculpture is its very essence; it is present even in the portrait heads, whose sensuous surfaces seem to demand we touch them, if not actually, then vicariously through the imagination. Although the four Backs that monumentally line the exhibition entrance are over six feet tall, the rest of Matisse's sculpture is much under life-size. Indeed, some are no bigger than the palm of the hand, suggesting again that they are meant to be held and fondled. The intimacy of Matisse's sculpture contrasts sharply with the monumentality and decorative quality of his major paintings. In his fine new monograph The Sculpture of Henri Matisse ($15, Harry N. Abrams), Albert Elsen discusses the relationship of Matisse's sculpture to the much larger oeuvre of his paintings, illustrating works like the celebrated 1907 Blue Nude together with the sculpture Matisse used as his model. Comparing his paintings and bronzes, one begins to understand why Matisse dad to make sculpture. As his paintings became more involved in intense color relationships, he was forced to eliminate modeling through shading, until in his late works, figures appear as completely flat cut-outs. But apparently Matisse retained an urge to render form in three dimensions, to leave the marks of his fingers even though he had renounced tactile impasto and raised surfaces in his transparent paintings. In his sculpture, which appears relatively conservative in relation to his paintings, Matisse felt free to work with the modeling, light and shadow contrasts and tactile surfaces he felt obliged to abandon in his paintings. And the work he produced within the traditional medium of bronze, although less radical, is no less great than his paintings. Recommended: Three women whose works are of interest share a curious similarity of sensibility, despite wide divergences of styles and media. At Staempfli (47 East 77th Street, thru 3/25), Mary Bauermeister exhibits wood and glass painted constructions and reliefs in a surrealizing vein that are both clever and surprising; at the Kornblee gallery (58 East 79th Street, thru 4/6) Susan Crile is showing sophisticated color paintings based on the motif of the complex patterning of Oriental rugs, pictured as if they were slipping off the canvas. Parisian based black sculptress Barbara Chase-Riboud (at Betty Parsons, 70 NEW YORK
