Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony
Acquavella
April 9–May 22, 2026
New York

Henri Matisse (b. 1869; d. 1954) was the star of the Museum of Modern Art’s first solo show in 1931. The exhibition comprised more than 130 works and was visited by thousands. Close to a century later, Acquavella’s current Matisse exhibition includes only fifty works—paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—but the lines outside the gallery prove that Matisse’s popularity has not waned.

But the Matisse of 1931 is not the Matisse of 2026. What did American viewers in the time of Grant Wood (b. 1891; d. 1942) and Thomas Hart Benton (b. 1889; d. 1975) think if they were seeing Matisse for the first time? Did he represent the cutting edge of modernity or was he already a painter from the past, a nineteenth-century artist still working in the twentieth? For us, Matisse is history, part of a coherent narrative that runs from Impressionism to Vincent van Gogh, to Paul Cezanne, to the Fauves. His work is a mainstay in prominent museums and art history classes alike, so he has acquired the status of a classic.

Like us, Matisse also went to exhibitions. We don’t have to stretch too far to imagine how he might have reacted to the van Gogh retrospective, made up of seventy-one paintings, that was mounted in Paris in 1901: Matisse already owned drawings by van Gogh and had imitated him in portraiture and still life. A similar dynamic recurs in Matisse’s fascination with Cezanne, whose work he also owned. Matisse did not suffer from any kind of “anxiety of influence.” He took the work of his forbearers as models to assimilate and develop without hesitation. Perhaps Matisse’s status is best defined by the fact that in 1930, Albert Barnes took the then-unusual step of commissioning him to paint a mural (The Dance [1932–33]) for his museum: a living artist creating an instant museum piece.

Navigating the two-floor show at Acquavella requires some dexterity. The best approach is to begin in the ground floor north gallery, where the earliest pieces are displayed. Next, go up to the second floor, sticking to the north side. Here are myriad sculptures accompanied by early works. Then, remaining on the second floor, walk south to see later pieces. Only then return to the ground floor south gallery, which contains more later work and the four bronze castings of Matisse’s sublime “Back” series. This rare opportunity to see them all together makes for an extraordinary conclusion to the exhibition.

On the first floor, the painting Male Model (ca. 1900) and the bronze accompanying it, The Serf (1900–04), create an ideal point of entry both for this exhibition and for Matisse’s career. The painting is a reinvention of a classic academic genre: a life class exercise depicting a naked male model. For Matisse, this represents the opportunity for a virtuoso performance. The background colors locate the figure in an abstracted space only possible in art. The figure, clearly showing the affinities between the Fauves and the Expressionists, is roughly drawn, the body composed of geometric shapes in different shades. He stands on a table or box, a potbellied stove to his left in a corner to create perspective and depth. The academic exercise explodes before our very eyes. This is confirmed by the accompanying statue: the model, no longer in profile, faces the viewer, devoid of arms. The surface is rough, looking back to van Gogh’s brushwork and forward to Willem de Kooning’s clamdiggers.