Matisse -- works from the Cone Collection

Henri Matisse was, apparently, fantastically prodigal with his artistic talent. Video images displayed in this exhibit at the Minnesota Institute of Art show him knocking-off a pretty, if nondescript, painting of a woman against a floral background in what seems to be about five minutes. He must have created tens of thousands of artworks of various kinds and forty or so of them were sold to Cone sisters, two Baltimore socialites. These works, which include sketches, lithographs, fifteen or so paintings, and a number of Rodin-influenced and rather knobby bronzes, form the nucleus of the MIA show -- the last room contains some large books that Matisse illustrated late in his career and a few examples of his art made by the technique of cutting colored paper and, then, collaging these to form bold, and colorful, patterns. I recognized several objects in the last room as being favorites from the Museum's permanent collection and this art is significantly different in its character and rather impudent, improvised tone than the other works in the show. In general, Matisse almost always disappoints me and this show was underwhelming. Matisse endured a spiritual crisis around the time of World War I and created a number of epic-sized and astounding paintings during that decade -- these pictures are profound, mysterious, and troubling: images of huge blue doors and voids that suggest the encroachment of death or nothingness on his imaginationn. But the paintings in this show don't include any examples of these masterpieces. To put it bluntly, Matisse couldn't really draw -- his draftsmanship is always very questionable and there are a number of sketches and lithographs in the show that are so poorly drawn as to be grotesque. Sometimes, Matisse happens on a jazzy, abbreviated line that reads as a boldly sketchy, if expressive, outline of a face or form. But, in most instances, his drawings are hideous -- limp stringy hands with fingers stretched out like taffy, misshapen limbs that bulge where they should curve and that seem not only boneless, but also devoid of any muscle texture. He gets proportions all wrong -- although one set of variations on the image of a lying nude, shows that he labored assiduously to convert the defects in his draftsmanship into expressive distortions of form; the effect is successful in some of his paintings, the distorted hips and shoulders and the ugly starfish-shaped hands and feet do have an expressionist authority, but the display of variants demonstrates that Matisse is opportunistically modifying an image that he never did draw with any kind of authority or fidelity to life. One nude is so absurdly ugly as to be inadvertently humorous -- this is called "Seated Nude, Left Arm on Head," an image of a woman who seems to have a little Hitler moustache and is drawn with her breasts comically pointed in two different directions; she has elongated limbs and forearms that make her look like Gumby in the old animated films featuring that pliable hero. In his best work, Matisse flattens his figures into the decor so that they become just another element of the Moorish architecture and arabesque-scrolls in the tapestries against which they are displayed. There is one great canvas in the show: "Interior, flowers and parakeets" made in 1924 -- that picture displays Matisse's genius with color and pattern and the image is astoundingly subtle and dense with variations of yellow and green, a florid interior that manages to be both exuberant and claustrophobic at the same time: the little parakeets, one of which has its beak open to sing, seem to be trapped inside the lush, overwhelming decor. There are no human figures and so Matisse's draftsmanship problems don't detract (or distract) from the painting's excellence. Another paintings, "The Yellow Dress" (1929 - 1931) also has great authority and clearly represents an image over which Matisse labored long and hard -- the painting has a mask-like face similar to the kind of crystalline cheeks and eyes and brow that you see in many paintings by Cezanne, but the colors of the paint are extraordinarily subtle and indescribable -- tints and hues for which I have no name. Matisse turns everything into wallpaper, but in some of this better paintings, the wallpaper is a decoration of genius. Unfortunately, most of the paintings in the show are uninteresting, forgeries that Matisse produced himself, imitating better and more innovative canvases that he didn't sell to the Cone sisters.