ART REVIEW : Magnifique Matisse

It’s impossible to look at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhaustive exhibition “Henri Matisse: A Retrospective” without in some way regarding such an extraordinary show as a vigorous rejoinder to the acclaimed Picasso extravaganza mounted at the museum a dozen years ago. On the heels of an upswing in the critical estimation of the Spaniard’s late work, which had theretofore been dismissed as minor and redundant, a huge display of the full sweep of his inventive painting, sculpture and graphics was meant to solidify Picasso’s position as the defining master of 20th-Century art.

Now, “Matisse” says: Oh, yeah?

In displaying the full sweep of the Frenchman’s art, the retrospective of course says much else--including an insightful assertion that our very habit of pitting Matisse and Picasso against each other already tends to limit our understanding of both. In his hefty (and first-rate) exhibition catalogue, John Elderfield, director of the department of drawings at MOMA and organizer of the show, outlines the distinctions traditionally made between them.

On Matisse’s side there is a commitment to the power of color, decorativeness, flatness and shape, vision, harmony, facility and so on. On Picasso’s, there’s the reverse: monochrome, austerity, space and form, intellect, dissonance, difficulty, etc.

Where Matisse is on holiday, Picasso is at war. One is feminine; the other, masculine.

To the extent that our understanding of Modern art since the beginning of the century is likewise guided by common oppositions such as these, Matisse and Picasso function ancestrally as our principal models. In the dazzling MOMA exhibition, which was organized with the assistance of Beatrice Kernan and opens Thursday, Elderfield means to shake up those fixed dichotomies.

A leading Matisse scholar, he has not been unmindful of the larger revisions in art historical research and theory of the last 20 years, including social and political issues surrounding the production and reception of art. Neither imperiously dismissive nor blindly accepting, he instead engages those issues in deciphering Matisse’s greatness. For all its dedication, the retrospective is not a mere wallow in hero-worship.

The exhibition is immense. About 100 bronze sculptures and drawings are included, but the unapologetic focus is on Matisse’s achievements in painting. Some 300 have been assembled, beginning with the still lifes made while a student in the 1890s. Their origins in 17th-Century Dutch art are the first signal of what would become Matisse’s life-long interest in domestic themes of bourgeois luxuriousness.

Elderfield has been tenacious in securing difficult loans for the show. Some important works eluded his grasp, such as “The Green Stripe,” “Luxe, Calme et Volupte” and “Music.” At the last minute, “The Pink Studio” was withdrawn for conservation reasons by Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, thus dashing hopes of seeing it paired with MOMA’s own “The Red Studio,” painted just a few months later in the fall of 1911.

Still, it’s hard to be too upset in the face of the staggering abundance that is on view. Chief among them is a room that focuses on the radically stripped-down pictures made between 1908-10, and is also surrounded by amazing work before and after. From the Hermitage in St. Petersburg comes the monumentally vivid “Dance II,” never before seen in this country and perhaps the greatest of all Matisses; it hangs in astonishing company, side by side with MOMA’s own “Dance I” and surrounded by “Nymph and Satyr,” “Game of Bowls” and “Bathers With a Turtle.”

Meanwhile “Bathers by a River,” which has never been lent to anyone by the Art Institute of Chicago, now helps to create a breathtaking crescendo for the first part of the show. The elegantly brutish picture hangs in a room with two contemporaneous bronze reliefs from the series of “Backs”; the equally great painting, “The Piano Lesson,” whose similar palette melds a haunting mood of domestic reverie into a masterful display of Cubist space; and the eternally puzzling “The Moroccans.” (Do the rhythmic rows of curving forms at the lower left of “The Moroccans” evoke praying Muslims or cantaloupes displayed at market? The rather broad choice suggests the degree of wildly inventive transformation Matisse is capable of.)

MOMA’s permanent collection is a principal repository of Matisse’s art. With the exception of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., the other great public collections--Moscow’s Pushkin, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, Copenhagen’s State Art Museum and Paris’ National Museum of Modern Art- have been generous with loans, as have other museums and private collectors. Previously inaccessible to Western eyes, the Russian pictures are especially important to see, since they date from a crucial moment.

To accommodate so vast an undertaking, the rest of MOMA’s permanent collection has been taken down and replaced, on both the second and third floors, with the art of Matisse. As a statement of belief in the artist’s ongoing importance throughout the first half of the century, despite the on-rush of subsequent movements, the symbolism is inescapable.

The second floor is the most dense. It chronicles Matisse’s artistic education, after a flirtation with the practice of law; his remarkably rapid move into avant-garde experimentation; and, the extraordinary paintings of the years around 1910, on which his earliest reputation as a major artist would quickly rest.

The third floor moves much more rapidly. It begins with his departure from the environs of Paris for the Mediterranean port of Nice, upon leaving his wife and family, and continues through the highly inventive, painted-paper cutouts that occupied his final years. (He died in Nice in 1954, a month before his 85th birthday.)

The dividing line between these two floors is 1917. For Matisse as for so many others, the cataclysm of World War I marks a turning point in his work. The naturalism he had learned from Dutch art at the very beginning of his student days returned to the fore. Direct observation, which had been peeled away and remade in his prewar work, assumed new importance in smallish paintings of languorous, costumed models in highly decorated interiors.

His art suffered for it. Elevation of the low critical standing of the Nice paintings has been tried a lot in recent years, and Elderfield gives it another go here. It doesn’t work, even though the most brilliantly installed room in the exhibition holds 16 easel-paintings from Nice in the ‘20s.

Astute juxtapositions create visual conversations among them, complicating the whole in a way that benefits often wan, individual works. It’s also the only gallery nominally “decorated”--by a central arrangement of benches and a potted plant--which quietly echoes the paintings’ images of figures in repose in visually seductive interiors. Installing a room of knock-out paintings is relatively easy: Give them enough space and light, then get out of the way. But making a group of largely second-rate pictures look terrific is a sure sign of a curator who knows his material inside out.

These paintings’ emphasis on domestic settings with contemplative models sprawled in luxurious rooms is one clue to the radical significance of Matisse’s earlier work: His is an art of interiority, in which a rich, voluptuous inner life is the base and assertive source of worldly splendor.

However, traditional methods of naturalistic description now edged into his practice of remaking the visible world, through artistic imagination working in concert with the formal demands of pigment and canvas. Matisse had decorated his Nice apartment like a colorfully theatrical stage set, with screens and rugs and mirrors and fabrics, and he costumed his models like exotic actors. Suddenly, a feeling of veiled distance intrudes. His painting is transformed into didactic commentary, which dryly describes the nature of interiority.

A painter of Matisse’s brilliance doesn’t just stop making beautiful pictures, of course, and there are indeed a number from subsequent years. Still, the push-it-to-the-limit adventurousness of the first two decades largely dissipates, in favor of consolidation.

The chief exception is the variegated group of paper cutouts from Matisse’s last years. He cut directly into sheets of brilliantly colored paper, using a pair of scissors to “draw” shapes in pure color. Elderfield wisely tempers the rather wild assertion made during the artist’s last full retrospective, mounted in 1970 by Pierre Schneider at Paris’ Grand Palais, that the paper cutouts constitute Matisse’s greatest achievement. In 1970 challenges to the current primacy of color-based abstract painting were raging, and Matisse was being used as a father figure to shore up the weaker side of the argument. Now that the (failed) battle is over, the MOMA show restores a proper perspective to the cutouts.

In fact, one great glory of this retrospective is the way in which it means to deepen our understanding of Matisse as an artist engaged with the 20th Century, while managing to respond to current artistic issues without putting his work at the service of false aims. It’s simply a magnificent exhibition.

* Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., New York, (212) 708-9850, through Jan. 12, 1993. Open daily.