Word: elderfield
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...Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective in 1980. Now New York City's MOMA has done it again, with "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective" (through Jan. 12), devoting most of its space to an enormous survey of Matisse's paintings, drawings, collages and sculpture curated by art historian John Elderfield...
...time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400 works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz., outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick up a brush, so steady in its narrative line and -- not incidentally -- so sensitively hung, that even if you go in with a certain foreboding...
Only MOMA's resources -- its own collection, Elderfield's connoisseurship and the accumulated borrowing power that is the peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow...
...early 1912 and again in the winter of 1912-13. Hence the exhibition is fairly small, only 24 paintings and a large group of sketchbook drawings. It can be seen without sore feet and framed as a whole in one's mind. It is thorough, scholarly -- Jack Cowart, John Elderfield, Pierre Schneider and others have done a fine job on the catalog -- and, above all, full of exhilaratingly beautiful paintings that have lost none of their sensuous finesse and cerebral sharpness in the nearly 80 years since Matisse made them...
...possible. It defines the forms, sets up the changes of pace between areas abutting across a surface, provides the evidence of change and reconsideration that the calm look of his finished paintings only partly hides. "If ((drawing)) does not insist on its importance," writes the show's curator, John Elderfield, in his catalog essay -- as acute and satisfying a text as any critic in recent memory has written on drawing -- "it is because its importance is that of mortar between bricks, barely noticeable at times but what holds the structure together and keeps it firm...