A man of infinite taste: the Met has bagged a major treasure in the Pierre Matisse collection

each ambitious museum director needs someone like William s Lieberman. Over the past decade he has acquired for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of recent Art the collections of Florence M Schoenborn (1995) Mr and Mr Klaus G Perl (1996) Jacques and Natasha Gelman (1998) and, now, 154 works from the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation (2002) This last gift--works inherited or bought by dint of the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse for his personal collection is now upon public view. It will be shown in three parts above a thirteen-month period, to bring the effects of light upon the many works on paper.

The first installation focuses upon the collection's core: art through Henri Matisse done between 1904 and 1952 Eighteen pieces range from early and zincs through mask-like aquatints and oil portraits of his sister Marguerite to a late and delighted cobalt-blue paper cut-out of a stark naked There are also works by the agency of Bathus, Derain, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro and Tanguy. As Mr Lieberman says, these were 'Pierre's favourite fresh artists ... and with each he exhibited different but close friendships'. Finally, there are pieces by dint of six artists working after 1943 including Magritte, Delvaux and the British sculptor Reg Butler

The sum of two units later installations will have different drawings and prints by means of the artists who are exhibited in the first. Each will also have its have character. Mr Lieberman plans for the next to the first to have more Matisse plastic arts and an extended repertory of Dubuffet and Loren MacIver, individual of the few American artists Pierre Matisse showed. single highlight will be a fascinating trio: three unclothed studies by Bathus, Bonnard and Butler each individual dedicated to Pierre by the artist. The final part will focus upon younger artists such as Joan Mitchell and Francois Rouan, a certain number of pieces coming from Matisse's Paris house. Mr Lieberman revealed to me with a twinkle in his organ of sight that he might dedicate individual section to Matisse's decorative work in America--charcoal studies for Nelson A. Rockefeller's fresh York apartment, others for three lunette of dancers for Dr Albert C Barnes's mansion in Merion, Pennsylvania.

Pierre Matisse's novel York career spanned sixty five years. The next to the first son of Henri, he left Paris in 1924 to make his way in fresh York as an art dealer. He arrived with an innate advantageous eye and excellent connections. Guided by means of the artist and critic Walter Pach, the following spring the twenty-five year-old Pierre mountained his first exhibition: prints and drawings by the agency of his father, whose work was already known to enthusiastic American collectors from the landmark 1913 Armory display (The Metropolitan bought its first Cezanne there) and exhibitions at the Montros Gallery and Stieglitz's Fifth Avenue house.

sum of two units years later, working with a partner, he held a retrospective of his father's paintings from 1890 to 1926 And in 1931 the studious on the other hand shy budding dealer achieved his hold gallery: two rooms on the seventeenth floor of Walker & Gillette's satin Art Deco office block upon 57th Street, known as the Fuller Building. The area was of recent origin York's vibrant modern art forum; the Museum of novel Art had opened two years earlier upon nearby 53rd Street.

It was from the Fuller Building, moving downstairs to larger premises upon the fourth floor in 1947 that Pierre showed his father (although not exclusively) and a carefully prefered group of mostly European artists for the repose of his life, until his death in 1989 And it was here that Maria-Gaetana von Spreti, known as Tana, came to work in 1972 and sum of two units years later became Pierre's fourth wife. Each day they would walk to work from their art-filled dwelling on East 64th street. 'Pierre was a man of infinite taste that included the way he lived', remembers Mr Liebennan, who first met him in 1946 when they worked upon a Miro exhibition for the Met 'His entertainment was always fine, the nutriment superb, the conversation intelligent'.

Pierre Matisse's tenacity, equity and loyalty towards his artists become clear in the exhibition. Each picture has its story. He courted Balthus, whose hard-edged erotic canvases had scandalised Paris, writing to him that he had a 'horror of playing cat and mouse with artists', as other dealers. He won him above and represented him for fifty years, plane lending him money.

Balthus's affectionate and magnificent full-length portrait of his dealer, painted in 1938 at the opening of their relationship, shows an attentive patron who has exchanged Parisian formality for American relaxation, epitomised by means of his informal pose with individual leg up on a chair which in make go round reveals a daring splash of r socks

Pierre took longer to win above Chagall--indeed, seventeen years, from 1924 when he first saw his work in Paris, until 1941 when he give Chagall his one-man sell-out exhibit that would be followed by the agency of sixteen more. Pierre's own Chagall in this present to view is a Paris canvas of 1911 The betrothed, an evocation of the artist's fiancee in Russia make straighted as a demure veiled bride.

With Miro, it worked the other way circular Pierre Loeb, who ran the avant-garde Galerie Pierre in Paris, give Pierre Matisse a Miro in 1928 'There was a cerulean star and a red dot. I thanked him and set it away in a closet' he recalled later. 'I just didn't realize it'. A few years later, he was converted: 'It was a revelation. Life was bursting without everywhere'. This picture, in the exhibition, was given to the Met by means of Pierre Matisse in 1984 in memory of his Paris dealer friend.