In the 1960s, art dealers and publishers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght decided to create a private foundation that would showcase their collection, based on models they had seen in the United States. They were encouraged by Cubist artist Georges Braque who saw in the project a way for them to cope with the loss of their son Bernard, who died of leukemia in 1953. The first of its kind in France, the Fondation Maeght opened in July 1964. At its inauguration, then minister of culture André Malraux said, “This is not a museum, but a place made from love and for the love of art and artists.”

Today, the museum is home to some 13,000 objects, including 2,000 works by Joan Miró (the largest collection in France), as well as site-specific installations by Braque, Pierre Tal-Coat, Marc Chagall, Pol Bury, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptures fill the courtyard.

Closed on and off for the past seven months, the Fondation Maeght reopened its long-awaited expansion last month. “We had the idea for the expansion in 2004. It was what my grandfather wanted, but we could not find the right person for the job,” said Isabelle Maeght, the Maeghts’ granddaughter, during a press conference.

Designed by Paris-based firm Silvio d’Ascia Architecture, the new section adds 5,005 square feet to the museum’s footprint, without disturbing the original architecture by Josep Lluís Sert, who also built Miró’s studio in Mallorca. Instead, d’Ascia chose to dig four extra galleries under the existing building; the largest of which lies below the Giacometti courtyard. (They are only visible from the Chemin de Rondes, which runs behind the museum.) The largest one lies below the Giacometti courtyard.

“This is an extension project by subtraction,” d’Ascia said during the press preview. “As an architect it is important to know when to set one’s ego aside, especially in the face of an invisible project. I had to adopt a silent approach not to disrupt the foundation’s already perfect balance.”

These new underground galleries overlook a pine forest and the Mediterranean Sea, thus keeping alive the dialogue between art, nature, architecture that served as the foundation to the Maeghts’ vision for their museum.

Adrien Maeght, 94, the Maeghts’ son and current president of the foundation, added, “The basement rooms designed by Silvio d’Ascia have brought the site into the 21st century.”

The expansion will now allow the foundation to display its permanent collection (downstairs in the expansion) alongside temporary exhibitions (upstairs in the original building), like its current one for Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The new “Galerie de la Bibliophilie” opens the renovated building, showcasing selections from the 45,000 books in the foundation’s collection. Down a dozen steps are paintings by Pierre Soulages, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Messager, Fernand Léger, and others. The final room is dedicated to recent acquisitions, including a figurative painting by Hélène Delprat, who will be the subject of a solo show at the foundation by next spring.

The budget for the expansion project amounts to €5 million, including €1 million from Adrien Maeght and €500,000 each from the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Alpes-Maritimes department. The Dassault family also gave €1 million, through their “History and Heritage” fund, managed by the grandchildren of Marcel and Madeline Dassault who were friends of the Maeghts and attended the foundation’s 1964 opening. The company Triverio, which oversaw the original building’s construction 60 years ago, participated as corporate sponsors. “Without friendship this foundation would not even exist,” Isabelle Maeght said several times throughout the preview.

The theme of friendship also played a role in the Bonnard-Matisse exhibition, as both artists were friends with the Maeghts. “Bonnard and my father first met in Cannes in 1936 through a lithograph to be printed,” Adrien Maeght writes in the exhibition catalog. Bonnard then introduced Aimé Maeght to Matisse in 1943, but they only became close after Matisse and Marguerite randomly met in a doctor’s waiting room; “a man sat down next to her and asked her to pose for him,” and she soon became his “active agent.”

Today, about 40 drawings of Marguerite by Matisse remain; several of them are featured in the new collection hang. “At the age of fourteen,” Adrian continues in the catalog, “I had the privilege of attending one of these posing sessions and of making an eight-minute film—the only document I know of showing Matisse drawing.” Also on view is Matisse’s Le Buisson (The Bush), which hung above Bernard’s bed during his illness.

Featuring both artist’s landscapes and visions of Saint-Tropez’s light, self-portraits and several portraits of their recurring models, the exhibition mostly avoids pairing works by Bonnard and Matisse side by side. That’s intentional, according to the show’s curator, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Sévigny, a former conservator at Nice’s Musée Matisse. The focus here is on the Maeghts and their relationship to the artists: Bonnard encouraged them to open a gallery in Paris, and Matisse was chosen for the inaugural show in 1945. “What matters here is the synergy between the three, which served as a springboard for the foundation,” she said.

The institution announced on June 25 that the Dutch Restitutions Committee had published its binding advice on the restitution of Matisse’ Odalisque (1920/21) to the legal successors of Albert Stern. The committee concluded “it is sufficiently plausible that the sale of the painting was connected to the measures taken by the occupying forces against Jewish members of the population and arose from a desire for self-preservation.”

Stern’s heirs were represented by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. The organization said in a statement that the investigation it conducted “conclusively demonstrated that the family was subjected to persecution from 1933 onwards, first in Germany where they lived and then from 1937 in the Netherlands where they had fled and where they were gradually stripped of their possessions and their livelihood. They made several unsuccessful efforts to escape and eventually were forced to sell their remaining possessions to try to survive.”

Before the Nazis took power, Stern’s career as a textile manufacturer in Germany was incredibly successful, especially his company’s retail sales and exports of ready-to-wear women’s clothing.

Albert’s wife Marie had studied art and painting before their marriage, and was responsible for the couple’s collection of modern and contemporary art.

The statement from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe said the Nazis took Stern’s business, its building, the family’s home, its possessions, and most of its assets, pushing him and his loved ones into exile. The Matisse was sold to the Stedelijk Museum as part of the family’s last efforts to flee Europe in 1941.

Odalisque had been in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum since then, under the ownership of the Municipality of the City of Amsterdam.

The museum acknowledged in its statement that Stern and his family were subjected to persecution because of their Jewish heritage, and that they were “gradually stripped of their possessions and means of livelihood.” The family, formerly based in Berlin, emigrated to the Netherlands between 1936 and 1937.

As the funds from the sale of Odalisque were needed for the Stern family’s attempts to flee, the Restitutions Committee ruled “this was an involuntary loss of possession due to circumstances directly related to the Nazi regime.”

Albert Stern and his wife were eventually deported to different concentration camps. Albert died in January 1945 at Laufen. Marie survived and emigrated to the United Kingdom after World War II.

“The return of the Matisse is a moving and overwhelming moment for us all,” the Stern heirs said in a statement, calling the decision “symbolic justice” for Albert. “Our grandparents loved art and music and theatre, it was the centre of their lives. In the few years we had with our grandmother after the war, she transmitted that love to us, and it has enriched our lives ever since.”

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam director Rein Wolfs said in a press statement that there had been questions about the provenance of the Matisse painting since it had published research about works from its collection around the war period in 2013. He called the restitution a “step forward.”

Matisse lived and worked out of the palatial apartment, situated on the top floor of the iconic Régina in the city’s Cimiez neighborhood, for some 10 years, starting in 1938. It’s obvious why he was in no hurry to leave: the space boasts soaring ceilings, a delicately carved fireplace, and bow windows that open to the ultramarine French Riviera. The pictures provided by Côte d’Azur Sotheby’s International Realty are enough to make one’s own Brooklyn apartment seem like a rat trap of no release.

“Most come here for the light and the picturesque beauty (or scenery),” Matisse wrote in 1952. “I am from the North. The large colorful reflections in January, the brightness of the day are what attracted me to settle here.”

Matisse relocated to Cimiez around 1917, and rented rooms in various apartments around the city before purchasing his flat in the former Regina hotel. There, he pursued a languid variation on the neoclassical painting; World War I had recently ended, and with it his appetite for avant-gardism.

Instead, he painted sumptuous still-lifes, nudes, and interiors, and, after a trip to Morocco in 1922, he became enthralled with the odalisque tradition, a genre of Orientalist art featuring eroticized depictions of harems and (presumed) sex workers. Among his most famous from this series is Odalisque Couchée aux Magnolias, painted a year after his return from North Africa. (The work was once owned by Peggy and David Rockefeller and sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $80.8 million.)

Matisse spent the final decade and a half of his life as an invalid following an abdominal surgery—a “second life,” he called it. From within his hotel room, he developed his most radically innovative art form: the cutout. Gouache-painted paper was cut into organic and geometric shapes and arranged into dynamic compositions that sometimes laterally wrapped the length of his apartment and spilled into the dining room at the Hôtel Régina. Matisse died in 1954, with Nice proving to be his last, longest love affair. 

“Do you remember the light that came through the shutters? It came from below like a theatre ramp,” he wrote of the Hôtel de la Méditerrannée, one of his many homes, in 1952. “Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious.”

According to several recent biographies, he was also a workaholic, a depressive, and a frequent punching bag for the Parisian intellectual vanguard, which ran hot and cold on his paintings’ busy patterning and lush palette. (His stalwart frenemy Picasso, upon seeing Matisse’s full-bodied Blue Nude, from 1907, apparently sneered: “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design.”)

Be that as it may, by Matisse’s own account, painting was all that made sense; he was ordered to it like an apostle conferenced by God. “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life,” he said, looking back decades later. “I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges toward the thing it loves.”

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude III 1952, at Tate Modern in 2014.

He began making art without any formal training, guided by instinct toward the kind of pictorial innovation longed for by his modernist peers. Where the Cubists folded the human figure into hostile angles, Matisse let it flow. (“One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away,” he told his students.) Where the De Stijl painters organized the soul into rigorous geometries, Matisse released it in potent bursts of pure color.

This year, two major shows of Matisse will open in the United States—“Matisse in the 1930s” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October, and “The Red Studio” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on May 1. Both zero in on formative periods in Matisse’s career that culminated in two immense innovations: flattening three-dimensional space and privileging subjective experience over illusion.

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911

“The Red Studio” reunites six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic by Matisse for the first time since they were together in his work space. The painting from which the exhibition takes its name, The Red Studio, was painted in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1911, and depicts the artist’s atelier, filled with what amounts to a retrospective of his work. Small versions of his paintings are propped against the room’s walls, which are rendered in unmodulated rust red. There are no windows, or doors, or much in the way of perspective. Delicate white lines suggest corners and a grandfather clock. But the clock has no hands—there’s no need for duration or egress. Yet Matisse’s triumph is in overpowering unease with intrigue. Time is a drag; and anyway, there’s art to admire.

For a refresher on the artist’s life and creative achievement, read on.

The Lawyer Becomes a Painter

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born in 1869 in northeastern France, where his family had been involved in the textile industry for generations. (Matisse himself was a collector of fabrics from an early age.) After studying for a law degree in Paris, he took a job in a law firm; to counter the tedium, he started drawing. Later that year, while in bed with appendicitis, he was given a paint set by his mother, who was herself an accomplished porcelain artist. His passion for the medium was so immediate, so all-encompassing, that he reportedly warned his young bride, Amélie Parayre, whom he wed in 1898, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” (If that stung, she nevertheless supported him in his chosen career, acting as a personal manager in the early years of their marriage.)

Matisse did not attend art school but took classes with French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, among others, and reproduced paintings he saw in the Louvre. Many of his early works, some of which were shown in Paris in 1901, share the moody palette and grand compositions of the Old Masters. Others, like Still Life with Compote, Apples and Oranges, 1899, now in the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, were indebted to the Impressionists.

A Wild Beast

Matisse’s artistic breakthrough came in the summer of 1905 while working alongside painter André Derain in the small fishing town of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. Work made by the pair combines Vincent van Gogh’s vigorous brushwork, Georges Seurat’s brilliant color, and Paul Cézanne’s fracturing of space; paints were used straight from the tube rather than mixed, and laid down in bold strokes.

Later that year, Matisse caused a stir at the Salon d’Automne in Paris with his entry, the half-length portrait Woman with a Hat. Amélie sat for the picture and is outfitted like a proper bourgeoise with gloves, fan, and elaborate chapeau. Decorum ends there, however; the painting is made up of large, irregular patches of outlandish hues, which inspired critic Louis Vauxcelles to call Matisse and Derain—who submitted an equally expressive piece—fauves, or “wild beasts,” thus defining a movement. Woman with a Hat was acquired by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a coveted acknowledgment from Paris’s preeminent tastemakers.

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905.

Matisse became the leader of the Fauves, a troupe united by their rejection of naturalism, which included Georges Rouault and Henri-Charles Manguin. Matisse’s monumental Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) from 1905, a painting of nude revelers executed in rich, autumnal colors, is the distillation of Fauvism. It was first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents of 1906, where its subject matter and distorted perspective caused even greater outrage than Woman with a Hat. (Picasso, not to be outdone, immediately started on his groundbreaking Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.)

Fauvism, however, was a short-lived movement; by 1908 many of the Fauves had taken up Cubism. Matisse, for his part, regained an interest in line work as a counterpoint to his simplified forms.

A Prolific Period

In the decade following, Matisse would produce some of his most important pieces, beginning with Dance I, 1909, a preliminary study for a painting commissioned by his patron, the Russian industrialist Sergei Shchukin. In contrast to his earlier works, he used only five colors in the monumental canvas—a reductive approach that stresses the light steps of the dancers, who seem almost to float over the grass. One reaches an arm to the next in a motion so fluid, it takes a second look to realize the break in the circle. Matisse knew he’d attained something special and called the painting “the overpowering climax of luminosity.” A year later he completed Dance II. The mood here is tenser. The dancers are bloodred, and new line work shows straining muscles. The dance is now less a celebration than a ritual.

Henri Matisse, Dance (I), 1909.

The fierce exuberance of these early paintings settled, for the better, into something more shadowed and stranger, as in the enigmatic Bathers with a Turtle, in which three stone-faced, awkwardly posed nude women observe a turtle; one woman offers it a scrap of food. The masterpiece Piano Lesson, from 1916, is the closest Matisse came to Cubism. It’s a picture of his son, Pierre, practicing piano, but the abstracted details of the scene trip the viewer at every turn. A darkening garden seen through the window is reduced to a green wedge; an echoing triangle of shadow, cast by a harsh interior light, obscures part of the boy’s face. Matisse painted this while Pierre was serving in World War I. His father seems to be conjuring a happier memory, but the present intrudes.

A New Home in Nice

In 1917 Matisse relocated to Cimiez, a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, where he pursued a relaxed variation on neoclassical painting that was well received. World War I had ended, and with it a degree of avant-gardism in France. He rented a room at the Hôtel Beau Rivage facing the beach. While living there, he rose early, ate simply from the hotel’s restaurant, and painted incessantly. He produced sumptuous interiors whose windows open to views of bright sky and sea. In 1922, following a trip to Morocco, he embarked on series of odalisques—a genre of Orientalist art featuring eroticized depictions of harems or concubines—like Odalisque Couchée aux Magnolias, painted a year after his return from North Africa. He claimed he created odalisques as an excuse to “paint the nude,” but he seems to have taken greater pleasure in the women’s excessively ornamental environments, as in Odalisque with Tambourine (Harmony in Blue), 1926, in which a Moorish carved and painted door nearly subsumes the seminude model’s presence.

Henri Matisse, Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, 1923.

The Last, Radical Cutouts

Matisse stayed in Nice until his death in 1954. He spent the final decade and a half of his life as an invalid following an abdominal surgery—a “second life,” he called it, dedicated only to art. He set oil painting aside and developed his most radically innovative art form, the cutout. He put scissors to gouache-painted paper to create organic and geometric shapes, then arranged them into dynamic compositions with help from his studio assistant and secretary, Lydia Delectorskaya.

Modest experiments grew into ambitious undertakings. His cutout projects included prototypes for the 1947 illustrated book Jazz and a commission for a convent in Venice—the final design for which included 17 stained-glass windows and several abstract murals. (The modernist chapel opened in 1951 to the puzzlement of the nuns, who eventually embraced its singular aesthetic as a point of pride.)

In the summer of 1952, after returning from a trip to the pool in Cannes, he bid Delectorskaya to laterally wrap the walls of the dining room at the Hôtel Régina with white paper. He then cut divers and sea creatures out of deep-blue paper and pinned them onto the white backdrop, orchestrating a dance of bodies breaching the water.

Matisse once said that throughout his artistic career he was searching for “the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.” As a testament to the success of his search, take the female figure—a subject he explored ceaselessly and made new, as in the 1950 cutout Zulma. She is limited to essentials, gentle lines and radiant color, and mysteriously liberated in the process.

The Headlines

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT. The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, said that it has received a gift from an anonymous local couple of 70 artworks by major American and European figures, including Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, and Alberto Giacometti, the Associated Press reports. The Bruce’s director, Robert Wolterstorff, termed the donation “unprecedented in its scale and quality. The museum is currently undergoing a $60 million expansion that is set for a March 2023 completion. Meanwhile, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio will sell three Impressionist pieces next month at Sotheby’s, with the aim of raising as much as $64 million for its acquisition fund, Katya Kazakina reports in Artnet News. The works are by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Matisse. The TMA holds other examples by each, and its director, Adam M. Levine, said that the new funds will double its acquisitions endowment and “allow us to diversify our collection, seeking beauty without bias.”

SPEAKING OF MATISSE, a triumvirate of august museums is collaborating on what sounds like a sure-fire blockbuster about the artist, the New York Times reports. “Matisse in the 1930s” will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October with more than 100 works, and then travel to the other two institutions involved in the project, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (next February) and the Musée Matisse Nice in France (that June). Among the works in the show will be Le Chant (1938), a sprawling painting commissioned for the Manhattan home of collector and politician Nelson Rockefeller.

The Digest

A 1969 Picasso painting from the estate of actor Sean Connery will be auctioned at Christie’s in Hong Kong on May 26 with an estimate equivalent to about $19 million. The Finding Forrester star began collecting in the 1980s, and “cared about painting a lot,” according to his son, Stephane Connery, who is an art adviser. [Financial Times]

The Court of Appeal in the United Kingdom has been asked to review the recent court decision acquitting four activists of criminal charges over the tearing down of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. Attorney General Suella Braverman made the request “to clarify the law around protests,” she said. The process will not alter the verdicts in the case. [BBC News]

Journalist Judd Tully spoke with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, about the exhibition that they have curated of their brother’s work at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Manhattan’s West Chelsea neighborhood. [ARTnews]

In London next month, Sotheby’s will present a show of portraits of British queens as part of the platinum jubilee celebrations marking Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne. No fewer than 50 tiaras will also be on hand, joining Andy Warhol’s depiction of Elizabeth II and the “Armada Portrait” of Elizabeth I, among other artworks. [The Guardian]

Painter Stanley Whitney got the profile treatment in advance of a show of his work that will open during the Venice Biennale next week. That exhibition is being presented by New York’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery (soon to become the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), which will mount a 2024 Whitney retrospective.
[The Wall Street Journal]

Artist William Wegman shot an Hermès Bolide bag—retail price: $21,300—for a Vanity Fair column. Naturally, a Weimaraner holds the accessory in the picture. [Vanity Fair]

The Kicker

THE RELIABLY INVENTIVE AND IMPOSSIBLE-TO-CATEGORIZE artist Seth Price just opened a show of paintings at Sadie Coles HQ in London, and spoke with the Guardian about that age-old medium . “Painting is like a historically perfectly evolved art form,” he told the paper. “It’s like the way a cockroach or a shark is perfectly evolved. Of course, it does continue to evolve . . .” The quotation goes on from there, but it cannot be published in this family friendly newsletter. Want even more Price? In 2018, he published a lively diary about his media consumption in ARTnews. [The Guardian]

The Headlines

AN ART-CRIME DIGEST TO START MONDAY: Italy has arrested five on allegations of attempting to sell fake Francis Bacons, the Guardian reports. Authorities confiscated 500 works they believe are fakes. At the Port of Tilbury in England, vandals have broken windows that are part of an installation honoring the Windrush generation by the mononymous artist Evewright , BBC News reports. The attack “empowers me even more to keep working as an artist to try and represent the Black British experience,” Evewright said. A trial has begun in the Netherlands of a man accused of stealing a Vincent van Gogh and a Frans Hals in separate burglaries, the NL Times reports. He has pleaded not guilty; the works have not been recovered. To close on a positive note: An Anglo-Saxon bronze-gilt brooch that was stolen from the Rutland County Museum in England in 1995 has been returned anonymously by mail, according to the BBC. Museum staffers took a photo with the recovered brooch. They look very happy.

DO YOU ENJOY READING ABOUT ARTISTS? Then today is your lucky day. Adam Pendleton, who is showing a complex installation in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, got the profile treatment in the New York Times. “I’m trying to overwhelm the museum,” he said. Helen Marten, herself no stranger to intricate productions , has a new show at Sadie Coles HQ in London, and told the Financial Times that art prizes “are so dangerous: they generate so much spectacle. Part of the draw is that it is a spectacle and a competition. I hate that!” Rita Keegan, a key figure in the British Black arts movement, now in her early 70s, is featured in the Guardian on the occasion of her first solo show in 15 years, at the South London Gallery. “There’s very little space for an artist after they get to 50,” she said. And Dindga McCannon , another revered veteran Black artist now receiving more widespread attention, spoke with the New York Times about her new show at Fridman Gallery in New York. “I just kept making what was right for me,” she said. “Eventually, the world catches up with you.”

The Digest

MoMA will stage a show next May that focuses on a Henri Matisse masterpiece, The Red Studio (1911), bringing together all of the extant paintings he depicted in it along with preparatory materials. After its MoMA run, it heads to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. [The New York Times]

South Korean officials are reportedly studying the feasibility of creating a major museum at Incheon International Airport, which is currently being expanded. An official with the airport said branches of London’s Tate Modern and Paris’s Centre Pompidou are under consideration. [The Korea Herald]

Since 2015, Miranda Massie, a former civil-rights lawyer has been organizing programming through her Climate Museum, which sits at “the intersection of art, climate science, justice, and activism,” Tatiana Schlossberg writes. Massie aims to establish a permanent base for the itinerant project in the coming years. [The Washington Post]

The Los Angeles–based architect Kulapat Yantrasast has worked on numerous art venues, from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, to David Kordansky Gallery in L.A. Now he has designed exhibitions for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Tinseltown. Here is an overview of his work. [Los Angeles Times]

With London’s National Portrait Gallery closed for renovations until 2023, works from its collection will go on a tour of England, visiting Sheffield, Bath, Liverpool, and York. It is a “once in a generation opportunity to see some of the nation’s best-loved portraits exhibited together outside of London,” the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, said. [BBC News]

The storied New York dealer Mary Boone is done with her post-prison house arrest, and attended a dinner for fellow-dealer David Totah‘s new Wallace Berman show in New York. [Vanity Fair]

The Kicker

SOME ARTISTS’ HOMES ARE FAMOUS SITES OF PILGRIMAGE, like Donald Judd’s space in SoHo or Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City, while others are little-known and not open to the public. Alice Neel’s final residence, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is in the latter category. Photographer Jason Schmidt recently visited the apartment, which belongs to Neel’s youngest son and his wife, for T: The New York Times Style Magazine and shot intimate pictures . It has changed little since her death in 1984, and Neel fans will recognize certain pieces of furniture. In an accompanying article, Rennie McDougall quotes Neel saying of her sitters, “I go so out of myself and into them that, after they leave, I sometimes feel horrible. I feel like an untenanted house.” [T]

Two months later, on Valentine’s Day of 1955, Picasso completed his series, designating the versions A through O. As he had worked on them, the Spaniard’s captivating canvases had grown larger, the compositions more robust, and his forms increasingly fragmented. Although blues, reds, and greens predominate throughout the series, five are in grisaille, a monochromatic palette he favored during his Analytic Cubist period, some forty-five years earlier.

One of those grisaille pieces, Version L, completed on February 9, depicts only the woman at the left of the other compositions, who sits cross-legged and holds a hookah. Her ringlets swirl beneath a head covering, while her nipples double as the eyes of an owl spread across her chest like a warrior’s embossed breastplate. For many, the owl is a symbol of death more than of wisdom. Significantly, this ghostly figure was painted two days before Picasso’s estranged wife, Olga Khokhlova, whom he had been supporting since their separation in 1935, died of cancer in Cannes. As a performer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Khokhlova had worn an array of costumes; she was, in fact, photographed in similar attire in 1916. Within this series, until he painted Version K, Picasso had paired this seated figure with the recumbent nude in the scene. With Version L, Picasso made her the regal, principal protagonist, perhaps closing a chapter of his own life.

Executed by Cézanne sometime between 1895 and 1900, likely while he was storing art supplies in the Château Noir, these formations are the most abstract works in the MoMA survey. Two vertically oriented sheets, both titled Rochers près des grottes au-dessus de Château Noir (Rocks near the Caves above Château Noir), record horizontal slabs above and beside a triangular element. Faint graphite strokes outline the rocks, parallel lines suggest shadows, and patches of blue, green, and brown watercolor enliven the compositions. One includes the branch of a tree; the other is just an agglomeration of geometric shapes centered on a piece of white paper. What astonishes is how these detailed pieces verge on abstraction without becoming nonrepresentational; the site is so distinctively rendered that the artist’s fervent champion, legendary art historian John Rewald, was able to locate and photograph it in the early 1930s.

It’s rare that an older artist masterfully revisits childhood haunts. Unlike the dark scene replete with a blue sky, slender trees, and massive boulders in a robust and related oil painting of the same title (ca. 1904) that Henri Matisse once owned, the gray limestone and reddish claystone limned in these drawings, set against an exposed ground, seem practically ethereal.

Installation view of “Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” 1929, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will reopen after a $450 million renovation and expansion on October 21, marking one of the most dramatic transformations in the institution’s long and storied history. In the run-up to the museum’s next incarnation, ARTnews looks back to important exhibitions from MoMA’s past and offers excerpts from articles and reviews from our archives—moving decade by decade from the museum’s inauguration to the present day. (This first one on the 1930s is a slight cheat, since MoMA originally debuted in late 1929.)

“Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh”
November 7, 1929–December 7, 1929

The show: MoMA’s first exhibition brought together nearly 100 works by four French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Though their work had been widely seen in Europe, it had rarely shown in New York—and never in such depth.

What ARTnews said: “If it was the purpose of the Museum to disarm criticism at the start, to present an exhibition too forceful and varied for comprehension, it is possible that they may succeed. Many a frail critical barque will be swamped. But sink or swim, it is a great experience and more than worth the real effort it demands.”

“Memorial Exhibition: The Collection of the Late Lillie P. Bliss”
May 17, 1931–October 6, 1931

The show: Shortly after she died, Lillie P. Bliss became the subject of an exhibition at the museum where she served as vice president of the board. MoMA pulled out all the stops for a show of works bequeathed to the museum (including major pieces by Paul Cézanne, Arthur Bowen Davies, Pablo Picasso, and more) as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, and other institutions. Also included were Coptic textiles said to have inspired modernist art.

What ARTnews said: “The paintings left by Miss Lizzie Bliss to the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions are far more than a magnificent legacy. Each canvas seems a link in a thrilling adventure in modern art, more than a little mad and quixotic twenty years ago, and now splendidly vindicated. Although there are certain gaps in the collection, the most notable of which is the absence of work by van Gogh, the exhibition as a whole leads us with unwavering logic and clarity from the unconscious audacity of Coptic tapestries to the daring coloristic vision of Matisse.” —Mary Morsell

Henri Matisse
November 3, 1931–December 6, 1931

The show: Henri Matisse is the one of the most-exhibited artists in MoMA’s history (second only to Picasso) as well as the subject of institution’s first monographic show. With more than 160 works, it was at the time the most comprehensive survey of Matisse in America, and the offerings included some of the artist’s finest works, including Blue Nude (1907).

What ARTnews said: “This fifth—and most comprehensive—Matisse showing in America is practically a bestowal of final honors, made doubly conclusive by being accorded within the artist’s own time by New York’s most representative and glamorous body of art lovers. This new acclamation … leaves little to be added in the way of public acceptance in America. His success is sure on both sides [of] the Atlantic. He has triumphed in his own time—more so perhaps than any of his contemporaries.” —Ralph Flint

Installation view of “Henri Matisse,” 1931, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Diego Rivera
December 22, 1931–January 27, 1931

The show: The first non-white artist to be granted a solo MoMA show, Diego Rivera had become known in the early ’30s for his paintings from Mexico. For MoMA, he produced eight new murals—including one of his most famous works, Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931).

What ARTnews said: “I have to admit that these panels looked better in Rivera’s workroom where they were seen free of the walls, for they are manifestly not to be shown as easel pictures are. They need an architectural setting of measured stone or other appropriate material, rather than a conventional gallery backing. But even then, one can hardly fail to appreciate the splendid designs that Rivera has given us.” —Ralph Flint

“Machine Art”
March 5, 1934–April 29, 1934

The show: An exhibition of some 400 objects produced by machines left some observers confused—though it did prefigure an institutional lineage that would come to favor design and mass-produced items to be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities.

What ARTnews said: “We must admit that we have never felt any distinct aesthetic emotion while contemplating the polished sweep of the faucets and embracing curve of the white surface. But we do not mean to decry design and beauty in the objects which figure so constantly in our utilitarian existence. It is merely that we perhaps feel a slight irritation over the phrase ‘Machine Art,’ which seems to take on an almost religious significance for so many.” —Jane Schwartz

“African Negro Art”
March 18, 1935–May 19, 1935

The show: Curated by James Johnson Sweeney, this 600-work survey featured an array of African masks, sculptures, bowls, cups, and more in an exhibition that many would consider colonialist by today’s standards. In a press release, Sweeney said the art exhibited a “mastery of aesthetic forms” and could be seen as a clear influence on modernists artists such as Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Constantin Brancusi.

What ARTnews said: “Unfortunately, the result does not wholly bear out the wish of the organizers, which was, undoubtedly, to enhance the appreciation of Negro art. Hundreds upon hundreds of little figures, wrenched from the warm soil of native Africa, seem for the first time aware of their nakedness as they stand silhouetted against the bare whitewashed walls.” —Laurie Eglington

Vincent van Gogh
November 4, 1935–January 5, 1936

The show: One of the largest exhibitions of van Gogh at the time, this show featured 125 paintings and drawings, many of them had never before been seen in America. By the end of its run, the show had attracted monster crowds numbering more than 123,000 visitors.

What ARTnews said: “Many paintings by van Gogh have been shown in New York before. Many books have been written about the artist’s life but never before has there been spread before us, so full and enthralling a record. And when one turns to the catalog and reads the excerpts from Vincent’s correspondence there are words which often sing out of the blackness of his despair with flame like prophecies that are like the evocations of his brush work.” —Mary Morsell

Installation view of “Cubism and Abstract Art,” 1936, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

“Cubism and Abstract Art”
March 2, 1936–April 21, 1936

The show: One of the most important exhibitions in MoMA’s history, this survey focused on what Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum’s founding director, said led artists to “abandon the imitation of natural appearance” in favor of abstraction. Many stars of modernism figured in the landmark 400-work show (as did group of artists that a checklist identified as “African Negro sculptors”). Barr, as curator, also undertook the unusual gesture of featuring design objects, photographs, and films. (And the cover for the catalogue—a diagram connecting European modernist avant-gardes to non-Western sources—is now as famous as the show itself.)

What ARTnews said: “Boredom with the facts, as Mr. Barr puts it, is in truth but half the source of abstract art. One might even diagnose it further as a kind of general boredom, the peculiar ennui and listless dissatisfaction with established forms with which a few philosophers have already established as a universal psychosis, a world disease of the fifteen too peaceful years which led into the Great War.” —Alfred M. Frankfurter

“New Horizons in American Art”
September 14, 1936–October 12, 1936

The show: During the Great Depression, the U.S. government made a concerted effort to fund American artists as part of the New Deal through programs like the Federal Art Project, the results of which were presented in this 435-work show. Critics responded to the show—which included Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis—with high praise.

What ARTnews said: “The importance of this work lies in its distribution over forty-four states, in the consistently high quality of the exhibited objects, and in the harmonious relation that has been reached between the artist and his environment. Art is being lifted from its limited circle of admirers and at the same time is being divested of its esoteric and precious nature.” —Martha Davidson

“Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”
December 9, 1936–January 17, 1937

The show: This survey included almost 700 works in an exploration of how the strange, idiosyncratic tendencies of Dadaists and Surrealists could be traced back to art of bygone centuries (such as Giuseppe Archimboldo and Albrecht Dürer). The expansive framework gave historical grounding to acclaimed modernist works—including Salvador Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory (1931), an image of melting clocks that has become one of the most iconic works in MoMA’s holdings. Some critics took issue with the thesis, however, suggesting that the historical pieces had little to do with the then-contemporary ones.

What ARTnews said: “Are these remote but similar appearing objects really comparable to Surrealist productions which are motivated by a non-rational dream logic? … Although in many instances it is impossible to know whether the artists were unwitting Surrealists, there are times when it is obvious that the ‘fantasy’ is merely a visual representation dominated by the ordinary laws of cause and effect and as such has no relationship to the irrational logic of Surrealism.” —Martha Davidson

“Photography 1839–1937”
March 17, 1937–April 18, 1937

The show: Photography was not considered art early on, but MoMA came to the medium’s defense long before other institutions. This exhibition was the museum’s first major photo show, with 800 works meant to represent the medium’s first century. Included were pioneers such as Nadar, Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce, and Louis Daguerre as well as contemporaries like Eugène Atget, André Kertesz, and Walker Evans (who became the first photographer to have a MoMA solo show, in 1938).

What ARTnews said: “The Museum of Modern Art has certainly never more successfully fulfilled its function than in presenting the current comprehensive showing of the history of photography. Standing midway between art and science and perfectly typifying modern objective modes of thought and life, photography has long deserved not only this thorough exposition but also the illuminating foreword to the catalogue with which Beaumont Newhall of the Museum introduces it to the public.” —Rosamund Frost

Installation view of “Bauhaus: 1919–1928,” 1938, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

SOICHI SUNAMI/COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

“Bauhaus: 1919–1928”
December 7, 1938–January 30, 1939

The show: This survey of the Bauhaus School in Germany was one of the “most unusual” offerings at MoMA at the time, according to a press release issued before its opening. Mounted at the start of World War II, the show was hampered by a struggle to ship artworks from Europe to America—so photos of certain objects appeared in their stead.

What ARTnews said: “The exposition suffers gravely through the absence of material examples. Because of the malevolent attitude of the Fatherland very few actual specimens of the crafts were available. The demonstration therefore consists largely of magnified photographs that, though decidedly inadequate, indicate the enormous scope of activities that constituted the training of every student that entered the school.” —Martha Davidson

“Picasso: Forty Years of His Art”
November 15, 1939–January 7, 1940

The show: Staged in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, this 350-work survey was unprecedented in America. It offered many the opportunity to see in full the career of an artist who was widely considered one of the great creators of his time. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906–07)—one of the many Picasso masterpieces owned by MoMA—was included.

What ARTnews said: “The assembling and cataloguing of this exhibition furnishes an unparalleled basis for studying and experiencing the evolution of the artist—and one happily but slightly affected by the omissions forced by the European War, nearly all of the European loans fortuitously having been shipped just before the outbreak. … Most of all, I think that this exhibition must make the thinking man concede Picasso as the greatest artist of our time.” —Alfred M. Frankfurter