The Baltimore Museum of Art has one of the foremost collections of Henri Matisse works anywhere -- 42 paintings, 20 sculptures and hundreds of works on paper, almost all of them amassed by the Cone sisters during the artist's lifetime. But the BMA doesn't have any cutouts, the last great flowering of the artist's work. Made of painted paper cut by the artist, they are alive with the glorious color for which Matisse is known. But they are also among the most abstract works he produced, and Etta Cone, the sister who survived into the period when he produced them, did not follow him in that direction.
Starting Wednesday, though, the BMA will display a visiting exhibit of 31 cutouts. The works cover the period from 1937, when Matisse was getting into the medium, to 1953, the year before his death. They include the maquettes for the great book "Jazz" and the "Blue Nudes" of 1952, with which the artist recalled one of his most famous works, the BMA's "Blue Nude" of 1907.
In fact, the BMA's "Blue Nude" is why the BMA is getting the cutouts, which are owned by the Musee national d'art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The Pompidou is lending the works in return for the loan of "Blue Nude" to the Pompidou's 1993 show of Matisse's work.
To get 31 works in return for one is a pretty good trade-off, but Brenda Richardson, the BMA's curator of modern painting and sculpture, says it took just such a price for Paris to get our "Blue Nude."
When Richardson was approached a couple of years ago by the co-curators of the Paris show, the "Blue Nude" had just been to Boston and was about to go to New York along with 12 other Cone Matisses for the Museum of Modern Art's enormous 1992 Matisse retrospective.
"We'd had Matisses out a lot, . . . and I felt that was depriving the Baltimore community," Richardson says. But the curators made a convincing case for the importance of the Paris show, she says. "They then indicated they wanted this painting so much they felt they couldn't do the show without it, and were prepared to offer substantial reciprocation."
The Baltimore curator knew exactly what she wanted. "I knew of their holdings in cutouts, and also knew that this museum, with its wonderful Matisse holdings, is absent only the cutouts. Therefore, I put on the table the prospect that in exchange for the 'Blue Nude' we would like to do an exhibition of their cutouts in Baltimore."
To her surprise, the proposal found wholehearted support. As a result, Baltimore gets all but one of the Pompidou's cutouts, which was deemed too fragile to travel.
The 31 cutouts well represent Matisse's production in the medium, says BMA curator of prints, drawings and photographs Jay M. Fisher, who organized the show with Richardson.
"If you were putting together an ideal exhibition of cutouts that surveyed his involvement with the medium," says Fisher, "it would be difficult to do much better than this selection."
The exhibit begins with two 1937-1938 cutouts of dancers, among Matisse's designs for the ballet "Rouge et Noir" ("Red and Black"). These are so early in Matisse's experiments with cutouts that they are pinned to the backing with thumbtacks; later cutouts are pasted down.
Next comes the largest group in the show -- all 20 original maquettes for the book "Jazz," which Matisse worked on in 1943 and 1944. "Jazz" is a book of color prints dealing mainly with circus and theater subjects; it includes a written text by Matisse consisting of notes on his life as a painter.
The style of the "Jazz" cutouts, says Fisher, is "a reservoir of the kinds of things he did with cutouts, from the figural pieces which relate back to the 'Dancers' [of 'Rouge et Noir'] to the more decorative arabesques which relate to some of his large-scale decorative projects, like the great cutout at [Washington's] National Gallery."
It's safe to say that the "Jazz" cutouts, with their circus themes and dynamic shapes, are among the most exhilarating and accessible of all Matisse's works.
The BMA owns the finished book of "Jazz" and will show some of the pages as a comparison with the cutouts. There's a big difference.
"The care with which 'Jazz' was printed has become legendary -- yet the difference between the book and the original maquettes . . . is enormous," wrote Jack D. Flam, an art historian and Matisse expert, in the catalog of a 1977 exhibit of the cutouts at the National Gallery. "The maquettes are much fresher, have a much greater variation in texture and in color application as well as color, a much more sensitive line quality, and an unreproducible subtlety in the play between opaque and semi-opaque surfaces."
After "Jazz," Matisse began developing large, wall-size projects. One of these is among the Pompidou loans -- the two panels "Polynesia, the Sky" and "Polynesia, the Sea," each 6 1/2 feet tall and 10 1/4 feet long.
Another of his major projects was the designs for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. "He designed many things for that chapel, including vestments, silver, stained-glass windows, the altar, . . . some of which he used cutouts for," says Fisher. "We're borrowing three cutouts for chasubles [vestments]." Those are from 1950 and 1952.
Also in 1952 Matisse did a series of "Blue Nude" cutouts, which in title, color and pose (arm lifted over the head) refer to the BMA's "Blue Nude." Two of those will be included in the exhibit. Finally, there's "Nude with Oranges," a late combination of drawing and cutout from 1952-1953.
Matisse created cutouts by first having his assistants paint sheets of paper with gouache (opaque watercolor) in colors he specified. Then he cut the paper into shapes, slicing with the scissors open rather than clipping. In effect, he was carving paper.
"Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor," Matisse wrote in "Jazz." But he also likened the process to drawing: "I arrived at the cutouts in order to link drawing and color in a single movement."
Once the shapes were cut, assistants arranged and rearranged them on a backing until they were the way Matisse wanted them. Then they traced the outlines of the cut paper on the backing, removed them, added paste and then reapplied them permanently.
Many people think Matisse developed the cutouts only after a major operation in 1941 left him largely bedridden and wheelchair-bound, and consequently unable to do easel painting. As such, it's easy to think of them as merely an expedient, less than equal to his paintings.
But, in fact, the artist had been developing the cutout method throughout the 1930s as a medium that allowed him more spontaneity than painting. He first used it as an aid in developing major paintings, such as the BMA's "Pink Nude." He pinned and repinned pieces of paper on the canvas to decide what to do in certain areas, instead of the more laborious method of painting and repainting. He developed the cutout as an independent medium as early as 1937, four years before his operation; though it was in the 1940s that the medium came to fruition.
Also during the 1930s, Matisse had been moving stylistically toward the flatter, more abstract look that he developed more fully with the cutouts. His most important paintings of the 1930s, the "Pink Nude" among them, "are extraordinarily flat, still images," wrote Flam. "Although still working from life, Matisse is already moving toward the kind of imagery that will characterize the early cutouts."
The cutouts, then, were a logical development for Matisse -- not simply what he fell back on when he could no longer paint. Says Richardson: "It's touching to see this man doing this in bed -- this great artist -- but it's not a compromise. It's not the only choice he had.
"This is a major innovation, and people are always looking for ways to explain those as if the artist wasn't genius enough to figure it out. But it was certainly a happy circumstance of a medium that could be developed in such extraordinary ways despite his physical problems. This wasn't a man who was willing to compromise, ever in his entire life."
MATISSE CUTOUTS
Where: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Museum Drive near Charles and 31st streets
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through August 14
Admission: $5.50 adults; $3.50 seniors and students; $1.50 ages 7 to 18
$ Call: (410) 396-7100