Matisse: Painter as Sculptor IV

Finally finishing what I started last year: So when you do a show about the relationship between an artist's paintings and his sculptures, the first thing you want to do is install work that demonstrates that relationship, right?

And that's where the puzzling Matisse: Painter as Sculptor at the Baltimore Museum of Art fell apart for me. Too many of the show's groupings were flimsy or non-sensical. (Some, as noted here, were spot-on. And in my first post I talked about how the show's biggest problem was bloat.) For every strong pairing there was one such as these:

What was a throwaway 1906 Picasso drawing of two nudes doing with Matisse's Two Negresses? Totally flummoxed by the joining of two works that seemingly had nothing to do with each other, I turned to the catalogue. "A primitivizing formalism and exploration of duality can also be seen in works by Picasso, such as Two Nudes from 1906, the year Matisse was reported to have introduced the young Spaniard to African art," the catalogue suggests.

Uh, except that the Picasso drawing is Rose period through-and-through (not this pre-Les Dems Two Nudes) and has pretty much nothing to do with "primitivizing formalism." (The sketches may be studies for the girl in the Barnes' The Blind Flower Seller, with which they share a model.) Apparently the connection that led to these works being installed together is that Matisse made a sculpture from a photograph of two girls from Africa (Paris was somewhat obsessed with all things African at the time) and that Matisse introduced Picasso to African art... therefore a Matisse sculpture titled Two Negresses belongs with a 1906 Picasso drawing. Thin.

Later, Matisse's series of 1910-1913 Jeannettes (scroll down a page or two) was installed with SFMOMA's 1916 portrait of Sarah Stein. There is no relationship between the sculptures and the portrait. Still, the catalogue tries: "The simplicity and austerity achieved in Jeannette V [at right] extended into [Matisse's] paintings. In works such as Portrait of Sarah Stein and The Italian Woman, Matisse rendered the features of the models as a series of simple lines and planes. In both portraits, the side of the nose, orbital of the eye, and brow are again joined into a single line; the eyes and mouth are expressed as simple lozenge shapes, and the face and hair are defined as broad planes of contrasting tones."

I'll certainly accept the relationship between some areas in the painted portraits, but Matisse: Painter as Sculptor isn't a portraiture show. Jeannette V isn't anywhere near as "simple" or "austere" as Sarah Stein, one of Matisse's most gripping portraits.

Ultimately, as I said in my first post, the show should have been smaller, much smaller. As constituted in Baltimore I couldn't figure out exactly what the show was about, nor why much of the work was there. Matisse: Painter as Sculptor should serve as a reminder that a show big enough to allow an institution to justify a hefty ticket price isn't always better.

Previously: Part one, two, three.

Related: Roberta Smith treated the show as if it was a sculpture retrospective. Which it wasn't. At least I don't think it was. Which was part of my problem with the exhibition to begin with.