When Henri Matisse was 20, he suffered an attack of appendicitis. To keep him occupied during his recovery, his mother gave him a set of colors.
The young law clerk fell in love with the colors and what he could do with them, and the legal profession soon lost a genius.But the world of art gained a giant.
The massive Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here shows how much of a giant. The show almost defies description. It is a collection of more than 400 works by the artist, including 275 major paintings, 50 paper cutouts and a sampling of drawings, prints and sculpture. It includes every period and style of the artist's work. Many works never have been seen in public.
This in itself is no small achievement and a credit to curator John Elderfield. A Matisse lover of many years, Elderfield started thinking about this retrospective 15 years ago when he was putting together the Modern's massive 1980 Picasso exhibit. The Picasso is the only other retrospective of such scale as the Matisse ever mounted by the Modern.
At that time, Elderfield and museum director Richard Oldenburg went to Russia to try to persuade Soviet officials to loan some of their Picassos to the show they were planning. Negotiations fell through, but in seeing the many Matisse works in Russia, the Modern officials hoped that one day the climate would be ripe for a retrospective that would include some of those works.
Well, the climate suddenly changed with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and here we have major Matisse works from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. These two, along with the collections of the Modern Museum of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, and MOMA itself, form the core of the exhibition.
The exhibit is divided into seven sections, arranged chronologically, beginning with his early works around 1890 and concluding with his cutouts at the end of his career, in the mid-1950s.
"What we have here," says Elderfield with obvious pride, "is a full account of this artist in a way never before seen; a totality of his achievement."
The first section, "Discovering Modern Art," features works from 1890 to 1904, and gives us samples of Matisse working in various moods, changing rapidly, looking at diverse influences, as he follows the requisite academic standards of his schooling in Paris, but exploring with the styles of other artists, such as Cezanne. With such works as "Male Model," "Car-mel-i-na" and "Sideboard with Table," we see the beginnings of an artist, as Elderfield notes, "who was constantly reinventing him-self."
The artist's "The Fauvist Epoch" is confined to the years 1905-07 and includes the famous "Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra." Matisse and a group of artists working with him were labeled "les fauves" (the wild beasts). Critics of the day considered their works "violent" in appearance. Basically, the artists relied on color to convey their responses to the subject at hand, disregarding the external reality of the object.
Color, in fact, became very important to Matisse from then on. Brilliant, flat color characterized the artist's works from 1908-1913, a very productive period that included two of his best-known masterpieces, "Dance ' from MOMA collection, and "Dance ," from the Hermitage. Seeing these two paintings side by side for the first time ever is worth the price of admission many times over. As similar as the two are, the subtle differences surface only in this rare side-by-side examination.
The period just before and during World War I, collected here under "Abstraction and Experimentation," has Matisse trying various styles, including the popular Cubism. Many portraits filled this period of his life. One of the loveliest is of his wife, "Mme Matisse," revealing a man in love with wife, with color and with life.
"Up to this point," says the curator, "color had been very important to Matisse. Suddenly, he moved to Nice (from Paris) and discovered light. In Nice, Matisse rented an apartment and filled it with mirrors, decorative screens and fabric hangings on large demountable frames."
Matisse mostly abandoned the opulence of the Nice period in the years between 1930 and 1943, opting for simpler form. He returned to some of his favorite subjects from the years before Nice, using variations of the female nude, but with light now (and thereafter) an important feature of these works. Matisse continued to work in Nice at least part of the year for the rest of his life.
From then until 1954, when he died at age 85, Matisse concentrated on the huge paper cutouts, several of which are displayed in the Modern exhibit. The gigantic models for the windows and vestments for a chapel in Venice also are included from this period.
Elderfield considers this an appropriate conclusion to Matisse's life and the exhibition. As he explains, "with these cutouts, which today still seem radical in form and composition, drawing and color, the themes which Matisse has explored throughout his career are literally united."
Tickets for the Matisse show, which is on display through Jan. 12, must be purchased in advance at the museum or through Tick-et-master. Tickets are sold for a specific date and time, so alternate date plans are suggested. Price of tickets is $12.50 for adults, $10 for senior citizens and students, and $2 for children ages 6 to 15. Children under 5 are admitted free.
The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 W. 53d St. Hours are Mondays-Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sundays 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.