We enjoyed the The Jewish Museum's show, Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters. The works on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art (good stuff by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Renoir, van Gogh, and more) are on display in an intimate setting. And the large center room is dedicated to textiles, once seen as craft-work but increasingly understood as fine art (here, a detail from an Indian silk Etta and Claribel Cone picked up on their 1906 trip around the world). Curator Karen Levitov has included personal letters and documents, jewelery, and other touches that help bring the collectors to life. Worth a visit.

Comments

[Jim Langer]

How prominent was "Persian" work in the show? Or Moroccan (Matisse was strongly inspired by such)?

[Ed Cone]

Jim, I'm not sure what you would include in those categories. The show includes a couple of his odalisques, including one of my favorites:

But it's a wide-ranging sampler of the collection, with pieces by artists who worked far from that idiom (e.g., Renoir) and Matisse paintings with very different feels (e.g., the Pink Nude), along with some sculpture and the fabrics.

[Jim Langer]

Thanks, Ed. I was wondering if the collectors themselves bought and hence were there such Near-Eastern/North African fabrics (or maybe ceramics or metal work) displayed alongside the paintings. I'll check out the museum online.