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

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Louise Nicholson

Every ambitious museum director needs someone like William S. Lieberman. Over the past decade he has acquired for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Modern Art the collections of Florence M. Schoenborn (1995), Mr and Mrs Klaus G Perls (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 the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse for his personal collection is now on public view. It will be shown in three parts over a thirteen-month period, to reduce the effects of light on the many works on paper.

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

The two later installations will have different drawings and prints by the artists who are exhibited in the first. Each will also have its own character. Mr Lieberman plans for the second to have more Matisse sculptures, and an extended repertory of Dubuffet and Loren MacIver, one of the few American artists Pierre Matisse showed. One highlight will be a fascinating trio: three nude studies by Bathus, Bonnard and Butler, each one dedicated to Pierre by the artist. The final part will focus on younger artists such as Joan Mitchell and Francois Rouan, some pieces coming from Matisse's Paris house. Mr Lieberman revealed to me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he might dedicate one section to Matisse's decorative work in America--charcoal studies for Nelson A. Rockefeller's New York apartment, others for three lunettes of dancers for Dr Albert C. Barnes's mansion in Merion, Pennsylvania.

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

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

It was from the Fuller Building, moving downstairs to larger premises on the fourth floor in 1947, that Pierre represented his father (although not exclusively) and a carefully selected group of mostly European artists for the rest 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 two years later became Pierre's fourth wife. Each day they would walk to work from their art-filled home 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 on a Miro exhibition for the Met. 'His entertainment was always fine, the food superb, the conversation intelligent'.

Pierre Matisse's tenacity, honesty 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 over, and represented him for fifty years, even lending him money.

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

Pierre took longer to win over 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 show that would be followed by sixteen more. Pierre's own Chagall in this show is a Paris canvas of 1911, The betrothed, an evocation of the artist's fiancee in Russia dressed as a demure veiled bride.

With Miro, it worked the other way round. Pierre Loeb, who ran the avant-garde Galerie Pierre in Paris, give Pierre Matisse a Miro in 1928. 'There was a blue star and a red dot. I thanked him and put it away in a closet', he recalled later. 'I just didn't get it'. A few years later, he was converted: 'It was a revelation. Life was bursting out everywhere'. This picture, in the exhibition, was given to the Met by Pierre Matisse in 1984 in memory of his Paris dealer friend.