‘Matisse: In Search of True Painting’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Henri Matisse was a nostalgist as much as he was an innovator. A painter who remained figurative in the face of abstraction and colorful in spite of Cubism’s monochrome palette, he primarily worked in oil on canvas despite the radical material innovations of Dadaism, and throughout his career he remained committed to traditional genres like the portrait and the still life. This exhibition, which curator Rebecca Rabinow has packed with 49 paintings that Matisse made in pairs or trios between 1899-1948, shows that he clung to more than just artistic tradition—he often painted and repainted the same theme in multiple styles, sometimes halting work on one painting only to continue on another, and preserving much of his own process along the way. Read More
