'Matisse as Printmaker' showcases evolution of a master

Though Henri Matisse is an A-list artist whose work is normally the subject of attention-grabbing exhibits, `Matisse as Printmaker,' a new traveling exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art organized by the American Federation of the Arts, is by no means a blockbuster.

It is, nicely, the anti-blockbuster - the kind of sharply focused exhibit that the Blanton has become deft at selecting and showcasing since it opened its new building four years ago. Its small scale and atypical focus offer a new snapshot of a legendary artist everybody might think they already know. Come for the big-name artist, stay for something you likely haven't seen before.

For starters, "Matisse as Printmaker" is hardly a large show. The 63 small-scale prints occupy one-third of the Blanton's main floor gallery. (The other two-thirds of the gallery currently feature "New Works for the Collection.")

Also, Matisse is synonymous with color: The French modernist master revolutionized the use of vibrant color as a means of emotional expression. "A great modern attainment is to found the secret of expression by color," Matisse once wrote.

But except for two works, the Matisse on exhibit at the Blanton is an artist working entirely in black and white.

Likewise, Matisse is celebrated as a painter. This is an exhibit entirely of prints. And while his peers - in particular Picasso, his great friend and artistic rival - continuously churned out prints during the course of their careers, Matisse practiced printmaking in fits and spurts over his half-century career, using the technically specific medium as a sort of extension of his drawing that he considered the essential element of his art.

"My line drawing," Matisse once wrote, "is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion."

There's a pecuniary motivation to printmaking, too. Produced in multiples, prints are infinitely cheaper than unique paintings. Matisse, like many artists, used prints as a way to sell his work to as many collectors as possible.

Though it's a compact exhibit, the trajectory of Matisse's evolving style is all there in "Matisse as Printmaker" - the early experiments with expressive gesture, the gradual simplification of line and form, the growing use of pattern and abstraction, all of which led to an eventual flattening of the pictorial space.

It's the type of exhibit that demands attention to detail. Prints, after all, do that, and not just because they're typically small. Traditional black and white prints such as those Matisse made are ultimately symphonies of simple lines - there is no bold texture, no color to define the image. And different printing techniques (etching, lithograph, woodcut) make for subtle differences in how those lines are rendered. To appreciate those subtleties takes some patient viewing.

Which isn't to say that the works on view don't have immediate impact. They do. "Nadia with a Serious Expression," for example, is a striking 1948 aquatint, the earnest, steady gaze of the model captured in less than 20 thick lines - an exquisite example of how Matisse mastered an extraordinary economy of line and a remarkably calculated simple form.

Though the Blanton's collection of 13,500 prints may be one of the best among any university art museum, it only includes seven Matisse prints, not one of which was added to the current show, though. "Matisse as Printmaker" is culled entirely from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. (As a bit of ballast, the Blanton has organized a small companion exhibit, "Picasso: A Graphic Inquiry," which features prints by the Spanish master from the Blanton's collection.)

The artist's youngest son, Pierre Matisse, who died in 1989, was a prominent New York art dealer who introduced now legendary 20th-century artists like Marc Chagall, Joan Miro and Alberto Giacometti to the art scene in the United States. The foundation now maintains Pierre's substantial collection, including many works by his father.

That the exhibit is curated by Jay McKean Fisher, senior curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, is also noteworthy. Though in this country, Matisse was first championed by New York's Museum of Modern Art (the museum is mounting yet another large Matisse exhibit in July), it's the Baltimore Museum of Art that arguably has the most substantial gathering of his work. A pair of wealthy Baltimore sisters, Claribel and Etta Cone, were among Matisse's first patrons, amassing some 500 of his works. Fisher arranged the exhibit chronologically, and that offers a sense of Matisse's come-and-go relationship with printmaking. (Matisse would nevertheless produce more than 800 images, typically in editions of 25 or 50.)