Rebel Without a Cause

MoMA"s Matisse exhibition directs our attention to everything but the art By [Lance Esplund] How do you turn Matisse: Radical Invention: 1913-1917, one of the most anticipated New York exhibitions of the summer, into one of the biggest disappointments? At the Museum of Modern Art, the show"s organizers's John Elderfield, MoMA"s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, and Stephanie D"Alessandro, a curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show originated's have done seemingly everything they can to transform Matisse from a master colorist, sculptor and draftsman, a tireless innovator, a purist and a radical visionary into a mere reactionary's a mere â??radical 's a rebel without a cause. Artists used to be radical and revolutionary only when new directions were natural outgrowths of their studio practices. For many artists today, bucking's instead of embracing's tradition has become their primary enterprise. And current thinking is adversely altering how we see and interpret an artist such as Matisse. By 1905, Matisse eliminated shadows and tonal values from his paintings. He liberated color, freeing it from its primarily descriptive function into one that is primarily emotive, and he pared-down his forms into economically pure expressions's revolutionary advancements that, equal in importance to Cubism, helped to usher in abstraction. Furthering's not ditching's tradition, Matisse never rebelled for rebellion"s sake. To suggest, as this exhibition does repeatedly, that Matisse ever left a mark on a drawing or painting for any other reason than that it served the whole work of art would be a lie. To propose otherwise is an insult to Matisse and a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his aims and achievements as an artist. Describing his working methods, Matisse remarked, â??Everything that did not contribute to the balance and rhythm of the work, being of no use and therefore harmful, had to be eliminated. Matisse: Radical Invention, an exhibition of nearly 110 drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures, is a concentrated study of the period 1913-17. It covers the five-year period between Matisse"s monumental achievements in Morocco and those in Nice, when Matisse was grappling at least to some degree with the advents of Cubism. This period produced Matisse"s three large and problematical paintings â??Bathers with a Turtle (1907-19), â??Bathers by a River (1909-17) and â??The Moroccans (1916), all included in the exhibition. Despite its title, however, the show actually comprises works from 1893 to 1931. There are a number of masterpieces in the exhibition, including â??Blue Nude (1907), â??Interior with Goldfish (1914) and the three 1916 paintings: â??The Italian Woman, â??The Piano Lesson and â??The Portrait of Sarah Stein, a luscious, modern Veronica"s veil, as well as the small CÃ&Copy;zanne â??Bathers (1879-82) from Matisse"s own collection. But overall, this five-year period is one of Matisse"s least successful. And it doesn"t help that, poorly chosen and installed, Matisse: Radical Invention includes some of the worst Matisses's notational sketches, iffy drawings and prints and unfinished paintings's I have ever seen. What is so infuriating about MoMA"s exhibition is that Matisse, reassessed here in sections titled â??Explorations, â??New Ambitions and â??Changing Directions, is being belittled and revised. Rather than unpack what makes Matisse"s art worthy of our attention, the show furthers the confusion that Modern art can be understood only if we examine every step of the artist"s journey along the way. The finished work seems beside the point. _ Through Oct. 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400.