Matisse’s Beauty and Splendour Defies the Protective Glass

Among the delights of “Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony,” an exhibition at Acquavella Galleries, is one which an art lover may want to keep on the downlow. The eco-activists in Just Stop Oil may have recently announced their disbandment, but that’s not to say a like-minded nutter or an MFA candidate in need of a thesis project won’t get bees in their bonnets and cans of soup in tow. For not a few of the Matisse pictures on display are au naturale — that is to say, without a protective pane of glass.How vital is it to directly relish the surface of a picture by a man who critics once derided as “King of the Wild Beasts?” The reasons to protect it are self-evident: Paintings are vulnerable to dust, grime, light, and vandals. That, and some of the things are worth money. If a collector or a museum is going to shell out a bundle of cash for a specific item, you can be damned sure they’ll want to keep the investment shipshape. So the safeguards are good.Henri Matisse, ‘The Idol’, 1906. Acquavella GalleriesAcquavella has borrowed some of the pieces from public collections — among them, MOMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection and the Cleveland Museum of Art — and they’re all equipped with protective glass. Yet a significant number of pictures are on loan from private collections in which fortunate individuals are accustomed to encountering an unfettered Matisse on a daily basis. For the nonce, so can we. Matisse’s hand is seen in all its equivocations, sonorities and sensuality. The pursuit is in full view.“The Pursuit of Harmony” is a big deal. It is the first Matisse exhibition Acquavella has mounted since 1973. The cost of doing so must have gone up in the last half-century, don’t you think? Footing the bill for insurance must have cost a king’s ransom. That, and the French master’s reputation precedes him. Matisse has done well at auction; a buyer should be ready to foot a bill in the tens of millions should the paddle land on an oil painting.Henri Matisse, ‘Odalisque in Red Coat,’ 1937. Private Collection and Acquavella GalleriesMatisse has also done well in the public imagination. An artist who trades in pleasure: Who doesn’t want more of that? Matisse famously stated that his art should provide a “soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair.” What’s deceptive about this notion is that it can obscure the rigor informing the work’s resplendence. Matisse’s exertions, famously direct and indelibly hard-won, are the viewer’s boon.The paintings, drawings and sculptures are, for the most part, dedicated to the female form. Much in the way Matisse’s brushwork moves with little pretense, so, too, do his compositions underline their own theatricality. His odalisques are less avatars of eroticism than nods to his hero, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and they serve as anchors to often wild efflorescences of shape, pattern and chroma. Walking through the south gallery on Acquavella’s second-floor almost gets too much to bear. Have we ever seen color imagined quite as boldly?Installation view of ‘Matisse — The Pursuit of Harmony.’ Acquavella GalleriesThe three-dimensional pieces tend to be sterner in affect, an attribute that may be due to the obdurate materials from which they were shaped. The purpose of these forays into clay and bronze was “always for the purpose of organization . . . when I found it in sculpture, it helped me in painting.” Only rarely do the sculptures achieve the lilt and lyricism of Matisse’s canvases, though “Figure décorative” (1908) comes close. Still, comparing apples and oranges comes off as so much nitpicking given the evident splendors of “The Pursuit of Harmony.” Visit it now.

Matisse’s Beauty and Splendour Defies the Protective Glass

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