This new Matisse cut-outs show is odd, since you can see some of the greatest artworks of the 20th century and still leave feeling disappointed. Good curatorship, like good umpiring, is most obvious when it’s not there: John Elderfield helped set the bar impossibly high with the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 Willem de Kooning retrospective, which remains, by a museum mile, the most extraordinary exhibition New York has seen in the last decade. But Elderfield has left MoMA, and we miss him.
The current show attempts a long-overdue examination of Matisse’s last and most beautiful works, which often get short shrift in comparison with his earlier paintings. It features around 100 cut-outs, including several monumental works and every great piece you’ve ever dreamed of seeing.
Unfortunately, there are two serious problems. Matisse, like de Kooning and most great artists, benefits from high-density displays. His works amplify one another. The feat performed so brilliantly in the de Kooning retrospective was the inspired juxtaposition of independent masterpieces: The result was an explosion of intensity on every single wall. I left the show in a happy daze, feeling as though I’d seen something so great as to be almost beyond comprehending.
The current show, however, raises our hopes high in the first room and then dashes them to the ground. There is too much empty space in subsequent rooms, and the pieces are largely prevented from energizing one another. In a bizarre bit of self-flagellation, the exhibit includes several small photographs showing how Matisse himself displayed his cut-outs—and the comparison should have MoMA blushing. In the black-and-white photographs of Matisse’s studio, you see surfaces chock-full and bursting with art. To hell with the boundaries of individual works, every square inch of the wall vibrates and pulsates, and the entire surface becomes a frenzied, chaotic masterpiece. Matisse’s walls were jungles, oceans, menageries.
Here, works are set apart from one another and bounded by an astonishing helter-skelter of frames, most of which are overstuffed with white matting. A child intuitively understands the relationship between volume and pressure, wreaking maximum destruction indoors, trying to escape outside where he can run around without bumping into anything. Matisse’s high-energy cut-outs similarly want to explode in every direction. That’s why it’s so disappointing to see their vivacity fizzling off into empty space. The right thing would be to yank every piece out of its frame and squeeze the whole show into a single room.
The second problem is fundamental: Matisse’s great cut-outs are dying. More precisely, they are fading away like old soldiers. The cut-outs are made from paper painted with gouache (opaque water-color) and then glued to paper or canvas backing. Matisse knew perfectly well that many of the pigments he was using—particularly the roses, reds, and the uniquely Matissian tangerine-orange—were fugitive and would gradually be destroyed by sunlight. He may or may not have known that other colors he used (especially his favorite, ultramarine blue) were susceptible to the acidity in paper, canvas, and glue. Some pieces are still in fine shape, through luck or careful preservation. Les Velours (1947) is so staggeringly beautiful that it would be worth moving to New York just to see it every day until the show closes.
Matisse also knew that the cut-outs’ inherent problems wouldn’t be visible for at least a few decades, by which time some clever young conservators would presumably have figured things out and could rescue the pieces for posterity. This challenge was taken up with relish by an expert MoMA team, which spent five years working on the show’s centerpiece, The Swimming Pool (1952), and failed spectacularly. And yet the failure is of such a character as to be totally invisible to most curators, conservators, or anyone else who approaches art academically rather than aesthetically.
By 1952, Matisse couldn’t go swimming anymore: A prolapsed stomach forced him to wear an iron belt that made it painful even to stand. So he decided to make himself a swimming pool for his mind, pinned on the walls of his dining room at the Hôtel Régina in Nice. The work contains graceful blue figures on a wide strip of white paper against a tan canvas. The conservators lavished their attention on the least important part—the discolored canvas—spending thousands of hours peeling, picking, and grinding the old material off the paper (and having the time of their lives, no doubt). They replaced the canvas with new material of the original color. So far, so good. They touched up certain areas of the discolored white paper, but not very many. The most important part—the ultramarine cut-outs—was left nearly unchanged. They filled in some abrasions, and that was it. Unfortunately, the blue has fared very badly, is now uneven, and, in many places, looks practically like it was dipped in brackish water.
The conservators enthuse over how “sculptural” the work has become, its mutability allowing it to do interesting things like curling off the walls. None of this would have been remotely interesting to Matisse—and to the extent that it was, he would have hated it. His extraordinary assistant Lydia Delectorskaya explained what he found important: “The contour, the composition, the tone of the gouache—are the components of the original work, they come from the art of the painter and must be sacred to the mounters.” Since this is actually quoted in the MoMA catalogue, it’s surprising they weren’t listening.
Director Glenn Lowry has said that there was simply nothing the conservators could do about the faded blue without destroying the original work. This is probably true, and means that The Swimming Pool is now primarily of historical, rather than artistic, value. Similarly, the maquettes of Jazz on display in the first room are especially interesting because they are the originals. But their intellectual value is gradually surpassing their visual value. The 2004 Anthese reproduction of Jazz, now worth around $1,300 on the used-book market, is a greater artwork: It contains the images as Matisse wanted us to see them.
So the odd thing about this show turns out to be the odd thing about Matisse’s cut-outs: Unlike almost any other type of artwork, there is no particular artistic value in the originals. If all these pieces were carefully and painstakingly re-created—preserving the “contour, composition, and tone” rather than the physical skeleton—the result would better honor the 20th century’s greatest colorist. Of course, a show of nothing but reproductions would be a scandal. But as the art world is busy deciding whether it is really interested in art, or merely what it can say about art, it’s a scandal we could all use.
Daniel Gelernter is an artist and CEO of a tech startup.
