The Brooklyn Rail

You can’t walk into Matisse & Renoir: New Encounters, the current show at the Barnes Foundation, and not be astounded. Who else can put on an exhibition like this? During his lifetime, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) bought 181 paintings by Renoir—the largest collection of this artist in the world—and fifty-nine canvases by Matisse. The museum is now refinishing its second level floors, necessitating the de-installation of all those pictures, and has used the opportunity to install thirty-four of them in a new arrangement in their temporary exhibition galleries. Together with great works still visible in the permanent installation like The Dance (1932–33), the mural Barnes commissioned from Matisse for the great hall of his museum, this exhibition includes such art historical turning points as Matisse’s 1905-06 painting, Le Bonheur de vivre [The Joy of Life], which literally altered the course of modern art.I’ve been in the Barnes more times than I can count, but I had never paid attention to the small Renoir painting Vendangeuses [Grape Gatherers] (ca. 1888–89) that hangs by itself on a wall as you enter this show. Though sensuously painted and lushly colored, as only Renoir could, it normally hangs in the corner of a jam-packed gallery (all the Barnes galleries are jam-packed) next to a spare Cézanne landscape, L'Église de Montigny-sur-Loing [Church at Montigny-sur-Loing] (ca. 1898), and is easily overlooked. To see this and so many other magnificent works from the permanent collection, singly, with space around them, is like discovering masterworks you never saw before. Every one of the Matisse paintings is a standout, but Barnes didn’t collect the most memorable Renoirs. There is nothing of the stature of Renoir’s Le Déjeuner des canotiers [Luncheon of the Boating Party] (1880–81)of the Phillips Collection or the The Great Bathers (1884–87) of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Barnes famously hung his collection as though frozen in amber. He and his close friend, the philosopher John Dewey, wanted audiences to see similarities of form between great works of art and utilitarian objects like door hinges, hand tools, vases, and decorative iron work. Barnes juxtaposed such things carefully and, even though he and his colleague Violette de Mazia often took works down to create new didactic comparisons for their students, he stipulated in his will that nothing was ever to move. Dewey dedicated his book, Art As Experience (1934), to Barnes and in it he articulated the core principle they both held:

Experience … is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one’s own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world … complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events … experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things.

So, the hanging in the Barnes remains unaltered to train the viewer to see the world, through set exercises in comparative forms. But Barnes was blind to his own obsession for control and the ways it can stifle creative looking. His training method didn’t go beyond formalist connections, losing interpretive depth.

The point of the show is the relationship—at once formal, spiritual, and personal—between Matisse and Renoir after Matisse moved to the South of France in 1917 and began visiting Renoir at his home in Cagnes. We might dive deeply into both the formal innovation and the content of any one of the works by Matisse in the exhibition—Le Bonheur de vivre, The Music Lesson (1917), his Le Madras rouge [Red Madras Headdress] (1907), his magisterial triptych Three Sisters of 1917, or The Dance , to name the most famous examples. The interest of the Renoirs, and indeed Matisse’s interest in them, has more to do with how they are painted—the rich palette and the tactile application of the paint. Grape Gatherers is just beautifully painted; the subject matter seems beside the point. Matisse learned from Renoir’s mastery over color, but the thrilling opportunity to look closely, with less visual noise around it, at Le Bonheur de vivre, to cite just one example, opens up so many levels of content. Matisse referred to the painting as “my Arcadia,” and that theme of innocence, bucolic peace, and pleasure recurred consistently in his most ambitious projects, not least in the large figure compositions of 1907-10, the great mural of The Dance, and the blue paper cutouts of the 1950s. “What I dream of,” he famously stated in 1908, “is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse posited a hypothetical viewer who was “tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance,” and offered respite in the painting. But that “viewer” was Matisse himself, who suffered from acute anxiety his entire life. Painting provided a lifeline transforming his inner turbulence into the soothing, beautiful patterns and color, the soft flowing line that defined his style.

Looking, not at similarities with the patterns and colors of the works and objects around it, but rather at the contradictions and disjunctions within Le Bonheur de vivre, reveal this deeper experience. In contrast with the tropes of rational perspective, balance, and the perfected proportions of the body in the classical tradition—to which everything in this picture alludes—Matisse created abrupt spatial ruptures between disjointed vignettes which he said he “painted through the juxtaposition of things conceived independently, but arranged together.” In this he anticipated the revolutionary innovations of Cubist collage. Inspired by Cézanne, he also twisted the ground plane in Le Bonheur de vivre and he used thick contours to cordon off the pair of large central figures from everything around them. The flesh tones differ from one group to another, subverting even that unifying feature, and the moments of naturalistic green in the foliage quickly break to clashes of stunning yellows and reds.

Matisse also deliberately underscored the cacophony among the sources of his imagery in Le Bonheur de vivre, taking the open circle of figures in the center from dancers he had seen on the beach from his balcony in Collioure; the goats herded by the flute-playing shepherd from neolithic cave paintings; and the grand tradition of the fêtes champêtre—the figure in the landscape—from Titian and Giorgione to Watteau, Manet, and Cézanne. As Charles Morice, critic for Le Mercure de France wrote in 1906, Matisse "seems to dream of following every path at once.” So, although there is something wonderful about the strange rigidity of Barnes’s mandate for its unique weirdness, validated in the magnificent accumulation of major masterworks of French modernism, I can’t help looking forward to the refinishing of the floors downstairs.