Matisse: Painter as Sculptor III

When an exhibition sets out to demonstrate the links between an artist's paintings and sculptures, it typically installs groups of work that relate to each other. And that's what the six-curator team for Matisse: Painter as Sculptor did at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Some of the groupings work -- but many are forced or just plain don't make much sense. That's why I wrote before Christmas that this could have been a better, smaller show. Today I'll take a look at what groupings worked and why. Tomorrow I'll look at what didn't work.

When I think of Matisse's paintings and his sculpture, several pairings are obvious: The Serf with Male Model. The 1907 Blue Nude with Reclining Nude. Automatics.

And there are other, more clever installations too. Matisse's Standing Nude, Arms on Head from 1906 is paired with an 1899 Cezanne of a standing female nude, and it's easy to see a classical pose filtering down to Matisse through Cezanne. (Matisse loved Cezanne's bathers, and the pose in this painting may be an even more direct crib.)

I also liked the grouping that joined the Met's The Branch of Lilac with Baltimore's Small Crouching Nude without an Arm (1908). In the painting, Matisse has re-created the sculpture, complete with a streak of gray paint where the sculpture's 'missing' right arm would have been. Loved it.

But why did the curatorial team have to go and muck it up by watering down the relationship between those two works? Nearby are over a dozen other works, almost all with tangential -- at best -- relationships to the two key works. Why? I'm all for curators being thorough in showing us how an artist got to a certain point in his painting and in his sculpture. But I'm not sure that the works grouped with Lilacs and Small Crouching Nude demonstrate anything whatsoever. Yes: They all feature crouching and/or seated figures. But why did the curatorial team choose to make tenuous connections between works when a stronger, albeit narrower, connection could have stood alone? If this were a sculpture retrospective I think I could understand why these works belong together. But in a show that (I think) is supposed to demonstrate the relationship between Matisse's painting and his sculpture, it's all unnecessary. What to blame but creeping blockbusteritis?

Some relationships between painting and sculpture that worked weren't installed in a way that emphasized the connection between two works. Baltimore's Large Seated Nude from 1922-29 is smartly installed with a corresponding 1924 lithograph, but the Beyeler's 1952 Blue Nude I is far away. The poses aren't identical, but it's clear that Matisse solved the question of what to do with legs and feet in the sculpture -- that is, the question of space -- and that he cribbed from himself 30 years later. Matisse did this a lot; throughout his career he introduced and re-used his own vocabulary. I think that's what this show wanted to demonstrate, but as we'll see tomorrow... sometimes I just found myself scratching my head saying, wha?!