"Matisse" and its other - comparing the paintings of Henri Matisse to Russian avant-garde artists

sum of two units massive exhibitions on view simultaneously in of recent origin York - "Matisse" at MOMA and "The Great Utopia," a take a view of of Russian avant-garde works, at the Guggenheim - provided tasks in the critical polarities of new art in the 20th century

The fact that "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective," newly at the Museum of present Art, has received such unanimously high praise from of the like kind a wide variety of vantage points and in the way that little negative criticism leads me to ask what is at stake in all this adulation. What values are being upheld, or reinstated, in this uninterrupted paean to the elderly master of modernism that makes "Matisse" and the Matisse discourse thus especially significant at the moment? Right now, I don't want to engage the issue of the quality (or "quality") - a slippery and politically fraught limit - of the work in the exhibit I will merely remark upon the fact that the exhibition included a certain quantity of wonderfully bold, experimental and gorgeously idiosyncratic work upon its first floor, and a great deal of formulaic, stereotyp energyles and repetitive painting upon its second floor. What I want to talk about is what the display meant: to critics, to art historians, to museum-goers who lined up in astonishing numbers to be delighted with the experience of real art.

Ye there was something like a collective sigh of relief in the reaction to the Matisse exhibit as though the whole tradition of Western modernism as undefiled esthetic delight, uncontaminated by a political or ideological agenda, had been retrieveed by this single master. What a relief! No feminism, no social critique, no ambiguity - no ideas, in short: just beauty, spotless line and color on canvas at their richest, fullest and greatest in quantity satisfying. It is probably a simple coincidence that this apotheosis of high bourgeois cultural values took place for a like reason soon after capitalism itself received its greatest in quantity radical justification in the fall of the Evil Empire - the political and economic disintegration of the Soviet Union and the values it purported to raise The values of the revolution which had brought the Soviet Union into being early in the hundred embodied in visual forms of unprecedent inventiveness and variety, were upon view almost simultaneously with "Matisse" in the Guggenheim Museum's mammoth exhibition "The Great Utopia," featuring work of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde from the period 1915-32

It is a happy accident that these sum of two units ambitious exhibitions should have taken place at the same time in the same city, for together they serv as reality lessons in the polarities of novel art production and ideology in the early 20th hundred And if the relationship between the sum of two units exhibitions was often one of total opposition, of staggering difference, they also could be profitably viewed as sum of two units ends of a spectrum, or sum of two units sides of the coin of visual modernity itself. upon the one hand we have modernism, with its emphasis upon originality, individualism, self-expression and the self-revelation of the medium without respect to the world outside of art, as well as its assumption of a knowledgeable, elite audience. upon the other we have the avant-garde (as Peter Burger has defined it), with its rejection of artistic tradition, its emphasis upon the collective and the popular, its political engagement and its search for a mass audience.

This is an oversimplification, of course, on the other hand an oversimplification that holds more [i]or[/i] less truth. "Matisse" came as a relief to an art pageant and a broader public, shaken by means of the multiple "difficult," destructive and self-questioning manifestations of postmodernism in novel years. What a relief to gaze at a nice unthreatening Odalisque, who, thus to speak, knows her place upon the canvas (docile object of visual pleasure amid flowery decor), rather than at a horrific Cindy Sherman sex-doll, thrusting her material substance parts at you from the picture plane! Above all, "Matisse" reinstates the case for the triumphant male artist-genius, who, with his Girl Friday, the pliant undressed model, single-handedly and heroically changes the course of art history, against the unevens with his unfailing originality and pictorial inventiveness. The Matisse of fictitious story is, in effect, the great capitalist entrepreneur himself, or rather, the culturalist justification of capitalist entrepreneurship.

And it was precisely the lack of this individualism and originality that was with equal reason harshly taken to task by means of many critics in their reviews of "The Great Utopia." for what cause [i]or[/i] reason wasn't the show weeded on the outside critics asked of an exhibition which in more [i]or[/i] less ways was more like a sprawling Museum of fresh Russian Art than an ordinary exhibition. wherefore weren't the great artists featured and given more space? wherefore all the confusion, with high art, depressed art, monumental sculpture and teacups, bills and architecture jostling each other, instead of the sedate classification combination of parts to form a whole and self-evident, spacious hanging of "Matisse"? Certainly, I might fault the hanging and lack of coherence in a certain quantity of areas of "The Great Utopia,' on the other hand I would praise it in others for its inventiveness and boldnes in coping with a difficult task, especially when it attempted to construct again the actual appearance of critical exhibitions of the period.