Ravishing colors, flowing lines, sinuous bodies: Henri Matisse made it all look effortless. But it wasn’t: Throughout his career Matisse wrestled with the fundamentals of painting—he revisited the same subjects over and over, and he often used completed canvases as models for later ones. Extraordinary insights into his process of creation are laid bare in the eye-opening new exhibition “Matisse: In Search of True Painting,” which opens at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 4.
New York has been on something of a Matisse binge recently. In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art mounted “Radical Invention,” a sharp, muscular exhibition of paintings the artist made during World War I. Last year the Jewish Museum presented a fascinating show of the Cone sisters’ Matisse collection, while the gallery Eykyn Maclean took a close look at the women who served as Matisse’s models and muses.
The Met's show is equally innovative. The nearly 50 paintings on view—pairs, trios, and longer series—reveal how Matisse used older works to generate new ideas. Sometimes the differences are subtle, and sometimes the works are shockingly unalike. In 1906, for example, after visiting the French fishing village of Collioure, he painted a sailor with the free brushstrokes and bright colors of Fauvism. Then he made a second painting in a much flatter style, reducing the sailor to fundamentals of color and line. “Someone wrote that a postman in Collioure must have painted the second work,” explains Rebecca Rabinow, the exhibition’s curator. “But Matisse was using repeated images to push his art further.”
Later in his career, Matisse hired a photographer to capture his work in the studio. He used photographs of his own paintings to judge whether he was making progress, or whether he’d gone off track. Visitors to the Met can see several completed paintings, including his voluptuous The Dream (1940), alongside images that document how Matisse built them up over time.
The show reveals Matisse as an artist who made the act of painting into something as important, and as inspiring, as his finished works.
“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” opens December 4 and is on view through March 17, 2013, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; metmuseum.org