For the past several years I have been wanting to go down to Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore
However, now that I have seen them, I am rather glad that I saved myself the trouble of going all the way to Baltimore Paris
Most of the works shown here are from the artists’ early years, when the buying was affordable by just about anyone, and most of it, I regret to say, looks like student work. For example: there is a drawing of Fernande, possibly in Gosol, which is a rather murky representational drawing. The Cone sisters knew Fernande and so I think I understand the charm for them of this drawing: they bought a souvenir of a friend signed by an up and coming young artist but a drawing not necessarily a good art work. It in no way has the intrigue and excitement of the early cubist drawing of Fernande, from approximately the same time, that Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There is a variation here of the well known Matisse drawing of the young woman in the plumed hat, but this variation is interesting only because it has obvious erasures, false starts, and searching contour lines. Whereas we have always been asked to believe that in his Ingres mode Matisse was infallible with his marking device, here we see that we have been misinformed. He was human after all.
Of the paintings the most interesting, by these two artists, is a blue period portrait by Picasso. And while it is a rather straight forward and sort of dull effort, it would fit nicely into an exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period. More about Matisse after this…
The most interesting and professional works here are the oil paintings by Courbet, Pissarro, Gaughan, and Van Gogh. The latter was done early in his stay in Arles
The best in show is the Courbet. It displays a facile mastery of craft and has an authentic expression of the sentiments achieving the stature of fine art. Courbet is one of those often considered an also ran painter but the more I see of his work the more I am convinced that he is an undiscovered genius lurking in the shadows…like Tintoretto. Should I live long enough I might become better acquainted with those two.
There are shown as well three beautiful sets of jewelry and some really gorgeous antique fabrics. If I ever decide to go to Baltimore
Matisse.
Back in the late eighties when I began to more seriously study modern art I was very enamored of the work of Matisse, more so than I was of Picasso’s work. Most of it I saw in reproductions on heavy, glazed paper in either art books or museum calendars and in such a slick, commercial presentation likely anyone would find himself enamored. However: there is a great difference between those reproductions and the actual paintings. The paintings look flat, whereas the reproductions are juicy, and the colors dull whereas in the books they are brilliant.
I have noticed on several occasions that there are various differences between paintings and their reproductions. The paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane are hardly different from one to the other media: they are about the same size and both have a nicely varnished and or glazed finish. Claude of Lorrain, on the other hand, can only be appreciated face to face: his paintings are larger than any reproduction suggests and the accumulated effect of size, color, composition and finish create both a visceral and an emotion response that one would not expect having seen only the prints.
As to why Matisse’s work is so different face to face I think I would have to say because of the finish. Most are not varnished, most were intended, I suspect, to look as if the artist had just left the easel …but 100 years later they look not “just completed” but dulled with age. One of the strongest attractions for me of any painting is its olio resinous impasto, the visceral experience of its presence. Sadly, in the Matisse paintings that quality is now completely missing if in fact it ever existed…he painted very thinly. And so we are left with merely the concept of the painting.
As for the concept, which is a perfectly good offering for an artist to make, in the case of Matisse its repetition wears thin after a while. His work falls into the early works which are a journeyman effort and fine for what they are, the period of Les Fauves when the palette erupted in a riot of color, and then his early experimentations with color and composition which resulted in some very good early modern art works, most of which are at the Museum of Modern Art. Then there were the very late papiers colles. What I find interminable is the long thirty year period between the great early paintings and the papiers colles when he sat in Nice painting odalisque after odalisque. There is one odalisque in this exhibition and it is dull with age, flat, the concept stated but the brush work sloppy and hastily done and if I never see another of these I think I could live happily ever after.
We are also shown an early female nude, the one which he reworked some twenty six times carefully photographing each variation. (As favored collectors the photographs were given to the Cone Sisters who of course bought the painting.) I was especially anxious to see this but was turned away by it because of its slap dash and poorly executed finish: it is a concept and only a concept, an oil sketch, which, had there been a finished painting, might have had some interest for me. Instead, I am further turned away from his work on the whole. As it is, its only interest is that the unintended abstract expressionist quality of the loose painting came to its fall development twenty years later when William de Kooning did his Woman series.
The only work I actually delighted in seeing was a large pen and ink drawing of a woman leaning against some cushions. I have a reproduction of this work which I bought at a local auction years ago and I have always assumed that it was a reproduction from a series of lithographs he did in 1936 where he drew directly on the stone. However: I think I prefer my reproduction. In it every line has the same weight and there is a crispness of the black over the white paper. In the drawing the pen is loaded and moved across the paper until the pen is dry and then reloaded. Thus there are thick and thin lines and blacks and grays but they are by chance and without emphasis as it relates to the subject. Whereas in my reproduction the subject can be approached and communicated with, in the original one confronts a calligraphic tangle of lines strong and weak. I don’t know that I think that was the artist’s intention.
There are as well a number of small sculptures of the female figure but alas I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture: I don’t know why anyone makes it and I don’t know why anyone would want to look at it. I gave them some attention but I remained indifferent.
For years after their deaths there was an ongoing art world dialogue in which it was asked: who was the greatest painter of the twentieth century: Picasso or Matisse. At different times I have sided with one and then the other. But when I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art some years ago and saw the title of their permanent collection: From Matisse to the Present, I realized at once that with Matisse we have some very pretty paintings but without Picasso there is no modern art. I had a very similar response to the title of this exhibition: Matisse and Modern Masters. Matisse has had his influence and there are painters who owe him a debt but most of those painters are not of the first rank whereas those who saw Picasso’s work and who studied his cubism and his drawing and his application of paint to surface have created the main body of subsequent modern art.
The more I see of Picasso’s work the better I understand that he was a creative force without equal in not only the twentieth century but in the whole of western, or even world, art. The more I see of Matisse’s work the more I sense that he was merely a bourgeoisie with a hobby. While this exhibition is light on Picasso, it strengthens that understanding of Matisse. As this is only a small sample of the larger collection, perhaps, if I ever brave another visit to Baltimore
The Jewish Museum page:
The Cone Collection, Baltimore
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