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| Purple Robe and Anemones (1937) |
There was
no missing that a major Matisse exhibition was in the Twin Cities recently. For
more than 3 months, every walk, bus ride, or freeway trip was in some way in
view of a poster of Purple Robe and
Anemones. Matisse, Masterworks from the Baltimore
Museum of Art was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from
February 23 to May 18, 2014.
Organized and
circulated by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition spans 6 decades of
Matisse’s career. It features 50 works of painting and
sculpture, 30 prints, and the artist’s book, Jazz. Most of the artworks came from the Cone
Collection. Two Baltimore sisters–Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta
Cone–acquired an exceptional collection of 3,000 modern works (displayed in
their apartments) including 500 works by Matisse.
With
the exhibition’s announcement in April 2013 and its review on February 22, 2014
in the Star Tribune, visiting Matisse was on everyone’s A-list,
especially this cold bleak Twin Cities winter stretching into April. The exhibition was high on
my list as well. I have long loved Matisse’s vibrant patterns, broad blocks of
color in unusual combinations, and emphatically flat compositions.
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| Drawing with scissors activity |
Due to a busy
couple of months for most of the exhibition’s run, I only made it to Matisse
on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late April. When I did finally visit and with
only 3 weeks before closing, I kept finding successive ways of engaging with
Matisse and his work. Altogether, I toured the exhibition twice, listened in on
a docent’s tour, eavesdropped on my husband’s audio guide, heard friends’
impressions, took photos, talked with a guard, observed families drawing with scissors, browsed in the
museum shop, and visited a companion exhibit, Chasing Matisse, one floor up. This group of multiple experiences differs significantly from my typical
pattern of a single visit to an exhibition as it does for most people, I think. While
some of my encounters were serendipitous, I nevertheless enjoyed them and valued the
intense and extensive engagement they all provided and they added up to.
Now, three
weeks later, impressions of the exhibition are strong and surface pleasantly in both
substantive and fleeting ways. I continue to make connections and solidify
understandings grounded in Matisse. I'm following connections
between comments and text, find a question, and recall a fragment from a painting. I am aware of feeling greater interest in the artist's smaller paintings than in
his larger paintings, prints or sculptures and to some paintings like Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924) especially. At certain moments,
I can conjure up the feeling of being back in the exhibition space and enjoying the sensation of a portrait dissolving into pure pattern.
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| Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899) |
In a daily
way, patterns and colors of fabrics surrounding me vibrate more. I want to buy oranges because I remember their rich color in Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899).
Durable Experiences
Through
multiple exposures to an exhibition and its elements, we gather more pieces of
information, draw on others’ perspectives, and anchor ideas in other knowledge we hold.
The deeper, richer, possibly transformative experiences we hope exhibitions offer
visitors rely on aligning a multitude of factors that are intended and
serendipitous and that we can and can’t control. But when exhibitions do manage this choreography
of various entry points, complementary opportunities, and extended engagement,
they create durable experiences that carry
high personal value and lasting impact for visitors and resonate over time.
The character of durable experiences is sufficiently complex that it can't be collapsed into a quick list
of criteria and folded into exhibition planning. However, identifying factors that might support durable experiences for visitors could help us understand how to increase the impact and value of experiences museums create. The four qualities below came through in my extended encounters
with Matisse. Broadly speaking, they seem to support durability in ways that reflect the complexity of exhibition experiences and our growing understanding of
learning in museums.
• The Necessity of Time. Learning, making
connections, or incubating ideas needs time. Even though I had an interest in
and some familiarity with Matisse, I found I had little background for the focus
of this exhibition. A second visit afforded me another opportunity to build up background
knowledge. For instance, I needed to read some panels multiple times and on both
visits to build the vocabulary for following the panels and consolidating
ideas the exhibition covered. Also,
it wasn’t until the end of my second visit that the interconnectedness of the
artist’s work came into focus. His investigations of issues in sculpture informed
his paintings; he drew models and then did paintings of them; in his prints Matisse
explored formal concerns related to his sculpture.
• Conversation as Intensifier. Whether occurring within or outside an
exhibit, conversation and dialogue serve as intensifiers, the way really is an intensifier that adds
emotional context to a statement. Conversations introduce new perspectives,
create openings, and activate possibilities for making connections and meaning
in an exhibition. My friend told me Matisse’s creative process interested her
most which I hadn’t thought about on my first visit. On my second visit, I looked for evidence of his
creative process and glimpsed it in the 22 highlighted changes that
Matisse made to Large Reclining Nude (1935).
Nina’s interest alerted me to this propensity to return to and rework compositions,
making his thinking about form, color, and line visible. Moreover, I saw this
as documentation
and how creative thinking might be made visible in an exhibition.
• Accumulated Experiences. Multiple, related,
and complementary experiences sampled over the course of several weeks extended
my engagement with Matisse to open up his remarkable body of work. When accessible, accumulated
experiences can be sticky. It is as if each collected experience sets down another
adhesive layer with the possibility of more, deeper, and lasting connections. An
audio guide, a reading area, the MIA website’s Exhibition Preview, interactions with other visitors, text panels, and the artworks themselves are
not unusual experiences for a museum to offer with an exhibition. Most visitors, however, typically
accumulate only one or two of the many experiences available. A guard at the
MIA told me about Chasing Matisse, the MIA’s companion exhibit one floor up. The reading area prominently located in a corner in the last gallery was well used on both visits.
• Sustained Attention. Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science uses the term, sustained
attention, in his recent interview with Museum2.0
blogger Nina Simon. Sustained attention, the several hours of attention we give a book or a movie,
is one of the goals behind NYSCI’s experiment with a new medium for museums, an
ebook. An ebook on the challenging subject of forensic
science and the problem of false convictions and my extended engagement with
Matisse are vastly different experiences. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, they help illustrate the importance
of sustaining interest and attention in a topic, question, or issue to increase durability. Both point
to the need for exhibitions–in fact for a substantial portion of museum work–to
be compelling, have impact; and for the experience to leave the museum with the visitor, move into
everyday lives, inform daily choices, and influence the future.
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