If your current travel plans don’t include a trip to Baltimore, you may just want to reconsider. “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor” is one of the don’t-miss shows of the season, comprising n o t just some 50 remarkable sculptures by the French master, but also a ravishing assortment of his drawings and paintings. Works by Rodin, Degas, Picasso, Brancusi, Cézanne, Giacometti, and other masters round out the show. It offers that rare experience: a fresh appreciation of a familiar lifework, delivered without esoteric theories or crowd-pleasing clichés, but simply as an eloquent display of the artist’s own, ongoing preoccupations.

Matisse famously advocated an art that served as a “good armchair,” but he was certainly no hedonist. The artist was plagued by doubts about his own work while remaining inalterably opposed to academic conventions. He approached sculpture as a break from the easel and found that sculpting ordered his sensations in a way that was helpful to his painting. This exhibition demonstrates not only that he was an immensely gifted sculptor, but also that his intentions remained startlingly consistent even as he switched among clay, paper, and canvas.

The chronological installation is airy and elegant, with the occasional vibrant colors of paintings crisply setting off the pale drawings and dark sculptures. At the exhibition entrance waits a striking pair: Matisse’s luminous canvas “Male Model” (c. 1900) and his 3-foot-tall bronze “The Serf” (1900–03). Both depict Rodin’s swarthy model Bevilaqua in a sturdy, standing pose. Rodin’s influence shows in the fervently modeled surfaces of “The Serf,” but Matisse’s attack is at once coarser and more deliberate. Its roughly hewn masses build upward from the base in a series of forceful cantileverings, countering the tilted neck and lower belly with the angling foot and chest. One arrives at ponderous length to the tucked-in mass of the head. Matisse’s raw technique belies the plastic intensity of the piece, and next to it Rodin’s “Jean d’Aire” (1895), a life-size bronze statue with a similar pose, seems just a little florid and lumpy.

“Male Model” is an extraordinary canvas in itself, but its juxtaposition with “The Serf” provides a riveting impression of the artist’s purposes. The sculpture’s hunkering masses have turned into an exuberant brace of pinkish-oranges and blue/green/ purples, their hues alternately pressing and shifting to forge a figure rising through space. Though outwardly more flamboyant, the painting shows the same fierceness of resolve. Hanging nearby, several related pencil-and-ink drawings — some of them contour sketches, others modeled with tones — provide further evidence of Matisse’s open-ended investigations.

Throughout the installation, the artist’s sculptures are grouped in this manner with supporting paintings and drawings. From the start, Matisse’s attack seems ever new. On display is his first freestanding sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye’s “Jaguar Devouring a Hare” (1850) that he completed in 1901. Barye’s original is also on hand, and it shows how Matisse ignored the hare’s frozen stare and gaping mouth, concentrating instead on capturing the momentous curve of the feline’s spine. His viewpoint, as quoted in the exhibition catalog, could be a yardstick of modernist formal composition; he sought expression through “suggestive synthesis,” rather than “passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by violent gesture.”

“Madeleine I” (1901) and “Madeleine II” (1903) depict the same standing figure, her bent knee and swelling back initiating a twist that resolves in the topknot of her hair. The sculptures vary slightly, but both beautifully capture the gesture’s essence while omitting details such as facial features and even portions of arms. One accompanying drawing faithfully records the figure’s natural proportions and volumes in rich tones of crayon. A very different drawing summarizes the pose in scratchy contour lines, rendering one upper leg twice its actual length. This bit of extravagance serves to make the figure’s gesture as convincing as it is in the sculpture itself. The truest likeness, it seems, is a matter of equivalents, with each medium requiring its own small falsehoods to tell a larger truth.

Wall text and a video describe the results of recent X-rays and scans of the “Madeleines” and other pieces. Original clay sculptures are normally lost in the casting process, but the scans indicated that Matisse adopted a painstaking method of preserving the originals in order to continue working on them. In other words, he didn’t allow even the immortalization of his work in bronze to interfere with his ongoing explorations.

The artist appears to have used this method of serial casting for his “Jeannette” and “Back” sculptures. Both of these important series are present. Executed between 1909 and 1930, the four 6-foot-tall “Back” bas-reliefs, with incised forms struggling to emerge from the background support, suggest the two-dimensional dynamics of drawing. In both series, the sculptures grow progressively less naturalistic — macabre, even, in the case of “Jeannette V” (1913), which has lost an eye and a part of the skull, while still managing to maintain its plastic integrity. Nearby, Picasso’s “Head of a Woman” (1931), a bronze clearly inspired by the “Jeannette” busts, has a comparatively anonymous air; one gets the impression that while Matisse sought a personal revivification of traditions, Picasso aimed for historic poses.

Matisse, of course, frequently incorporated images of his sculptures into paintings. The canvas “Still Life with a Geranium” (1906) includes the two small sculptures that rest on stands close by. One of them, “Woman Leaning on Her Hands” (1905) — a twisting core of head and torso supported by outflung limbs — evolves before our eyes into a two-dimensional construct of forking brushstrokes.

Matisse often seems to be at war not only with academic strictures but also with his own facility. His charcoal drawing “Standing Nude” (1905) seduces in surprisingly conventional ways; hanging between paintings by Cézanne and Delacroix, its studied completeness, with radiant tones and graceful contours, would seem positively academic were it not for its largesse of gesture. Utterly different is the tiny, nearly contemporaneous “Torso with Head (La Vie)” (1906), a headless, legless sculpture with thrusting breasts that suggests a primitive fertility idol. Blunt distortions reappear in “Reclining Nude I (Aurora)” (1907), in which the rhythm of the scissoring legs — one flung forcefully over the other — leads momentously across belly, chest, and head, to an oversized arm arcing above the head. The wall text describes how, in a moment of frustration with this sculpture, Matisse embarked on a painting of the same pose: the famous “Blue Nude, Memory of Biskra” (1907). It’s hard to imagine a painting as muscular as the sculpture, but here the arcs of hips, calves, and breasts vigorously pace the extension of the figure across the canvas — and again we see equivalents, expressed in that peculiar, Matissean blend of sensitivity and blunt force. The same qualities animate other highlights of the exhibition, such as “Two Negresses” (1907–08), “The Serpentine” (1909), and two versions of “Venus in a Shell” (1930 and 1932).

Alfred Barr conjectured that Matisse’s last major sculpture, “Large Seated Nude” (1922–29), was an attempt to revitalize the flagging energy of his work during his Nice period. This purported laxness is debatable, but the sculpture’s rather stolid rhythms do suggest that Matisse’s professorial side got the better of him. To watch a handful of lines more powerfully capture volumes, and even an entire gesture, visitors need only check out the lithograph “Day” (1922) hanging close at hand — or that ultimate distillation of a pose in painting, “The Pink Nude” (1935).

The installation concludes with several vibrant cutouts, among them “Blue Nude I” (1952), which is intriguingly sculpture-like in its broad, single-color arabesque and interior contours. In spirit, it is not too distant from the “Reclining Nude I (Aurora),” produced almost a half-century before. “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor” vividly conveys the long span of Matisse’s investigations, and, more critically, it also shows the breadth. It demonstrates that, in a sense, the artist was always part sculptor, constantly animating space as he stretched with line and pushed with color.

Until February 3 (10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, 443-573-1700).