I have said it often and others have said it to me: “Someone should
write a piece about Pierre Matisse.” Throughout his long career
as a distinguished art dealer in New York, he remained a taciturn
and extremely private man who was felt to be remote and somewhat
cold by many visitors to his gallery. Unlike, for instance, Leo
Castelli, who became as famous as his artists, whose oracular
pronouncements about art were treated as Delphic, Pierre Matisse
never made a public or quoted statement that I can recall.
A list of the artists he represented, most of whom he introduced
to America and promoted during the most difficult years of the
art market, should be enough to ensure him lasting fame.[1]
They include Calder, Miró, Giacometti, Chagall, Matta,
Dubuffet, Matisse (his father), the Spaniards Saura and
Millares, Zao Wou-ki, the sculptors Ipoustéguy and Reg Butler,
Riopelle, and the Americans Loren MacIver and Theodore Rozak. He
always denied that he “made” the reputations of his artists,
claiming “My artists made me.”
Typically, a collector or a fellow dealer, even a friend, would
ask Pierre if he had any decent Mirós for sale. Silently,
without any sales talk, Pierre or Walter, his longtime handyman,
would bring out three somewhat varied Miró paintings and put them
on the floor in front of a black curtain. When asked “Is that
all?,” Pierre would shrug and say, “That’s all I have right now.”
Unbeknownst to the collector or the art world at large, there
would be as many as 500 Mirós in the gallery’s warehouse. This
was only revealed after Pierre’s death in 1989 as he approached
his 90th birthday. The gallery’s holdings at that time totaled
more than 3,500 pieces by most of his best artists. This
inventory needed to be sold en bloc to avoid the forty percent corporate
tax on top of the nearly sixty percent estate tax both of which would have
applied had the gallery continued to operate. The executors
negotiated the largest single sale in art history, selling the
gallery corporation (not the inventory per se) to a
Sotheby-Acquavella joint venture for more than $160,000,000
(not the amount reported at the time).
Pierre started out to become an artist, studying with André
Derain, a friend of his father’s and someone who was particularly
fashionable in the early twenties when classicism and figuration
were returning to favor. Pretty soon he realized that his talent
was not robust enough for a real career as a painter (especially
one bearing the name Matisse).
In 1924 he came to New York and began his life as an art dealer
working the first few years for a particularly knowledgeable and
tasteful dealer named Valentine Dudensing. His was one of the
seminal galleries for European modernism at its most adventurous,
where one could find cubists, fauves, and other such post-Armory
show items, but also Mondrian and curious new 57th Street oddball
fashions such as Louis Eilshemius.
In 1931 he left Dudensing and opened his own very modest gallery
on a high floor in the Fuller Building at 57th Street and Madison
Avenue. He stayed in that location for almost 60 years until his
death, renting larger space on a lower floor which became a
legendary location because of the high quality of the shows, the
superb instal-
lations, and the beautifully designed catalogues.
During the war when so many celebrated French artists took refuge
in New York, the Matisse gallery was their natural gathering
place, where French was spoken more than English and Paris was
the real home base. In 1942 Pierre organized what is now a
legendary exhibition, “Artists in Exile,” mostly surrealists, but
also Leger, Mondrian, and Chagall.
At the end of the war in 1945, he put up an exhibition of the
great series of intricate gouaches by Miró called
“Constellations.” These small pictures on paper were like Bach
contrapuntal chamber music and were immediately recognized as
masterworks by the collectors who had first chance to buy them.
Pierre told me that a couple of sales were cancelled, however,
when the buyers arrived at the gallery to find that the works were
only gouaches and not oils. If I remember correctly, he said they
were priced at $5,000 each. The most recent one up for public
sale about a year ago brought $5,600,000.
1948 saw the gallery displaying the first of a series of stunning
Giacometti shows with the great existential sculptures, the
“Pointing Man,” the “Chariot,” the “Nose,” etc. At that time or a
little later in the early fifties, several prominent Abstract
Expressionist artists, including Jackson Pollock, offered
themselves to be handled by the now much admired Pierre Matisse
Gallery. But Pierre, after mulling it over, refused. His roots
were simply too European and his plate already too full with the
major artists, especially Miró, whom he needed to promote and
sell. Miró in particular was admired by Pollock and his friends.
Of course, another impediment to adding the major New York School
painters was the fact that Pierre worked differently than most
American art dealers. He bought his artists’ work outright,
choosing during regular studio visits, yearly or half-yearly.
After the war, as the art market in France and Europe generally
began to improve, Pierre had to divide his representation with
others like Galerie Maeght for Miró and Giacometti. Each bought
half the artist’s annual releases and in the case of cast
sculpture, half the edition. Pierre, therefore, no matter how
much he sold, was always short of funds and fell well behind
sometimes in his payments to artists.
The gallery archives, now permanently housed at the Pierpont Morgan
Library, contain hundreds of interesting letters to Pierre from
Miró, Balthus, Giacometti, Dubuffet, and above all Henri
Matisse. The artists write a lot about money and their immediate
need for it—please send something! But the letters are also
filled with genuine friendship and gratitude for what Pierre was
doing. Henri Matisse, famous in art legend as a difficult,
selfish, cold, martinet of a father, reveals in his letters to
Pierre a genuine warmth and constructive interest in his career,
and, in later years, a real dependence on Pierre for advice and
family diplomacy. All this is very well told by John Russell in
his book Matisse: Father & Son (Harry N. Abrams), which annoyed
the current Matisse heirs because he quoted too liberally from
the letters and somehow intruded on the turf of Hillary Spurling,
who had written the first volume of a brilliant biography of
Henri Matisse, and who was well into writing her concluding
volume (soon to appear, I suppose). Russell’s book never got the
attention it deserved, suffering from Pierre’s lifelong lack of a
public persona and his excessive pursuit of absolute privacy.
I was lucky to get to know Pierre when I was a young and
struggling art dealer. My wife, Clare, hit it off immediately
with Pierre’s wife Patricia, who still had the
considerable
remains of great beauty, a surrealist sense of madcap humor,
and adventurous ideas of entertaining friends. After drinks at
their beautiful house filled with marvelous works of art, we and
the other guests would, at Patricia’s orders, end up at a crazy
Egyptian nightclub or an obscure spaghetti house behind a family
grocery store. Her creative spirit and antic naughtiness seemed
from another era, but it kept the somewhat dour Pierre amused as
it did his small circle of friends.
Having admitted Clare and me into that circle, Pierre saw to it,
in his own reticent and backhanded way, that I shared in some
prosperity. He let me sell certain family paintings for him that
he wanted sold discreetly; he gave me half-share partnerships in
some of the things which were offered to the Pierre Matisse
gallery. The only other art dealer with whom he shared in this
way was his contemporary Frank Perls, whose gallery in Beverly
Hills became a kind of West Coast outlet for Pierre. Frank’s
raffish ways and his sense of humor
fit
Patricia Matisse’s “outré” style and Pierre’s need to be stirred
from his melancholy and workaholic habits. (He would usually go
to the gallery on Sundays to poke around and improve the
installations.)
Patricia died suddenly in 1974, and, since she had been the office
manager of the gallery, Pierre hired Maria-Gaetana von Spreti as
her replacement. She was an Austrian diplomat’s daughter who had
worked for the Paris dealer Heinz Berggruen, knew the art world,
spoke the major European languages. Since her father had died,
tragically, at his post in a terrorist incident, Tana, as she was
called, needed a father figure.
Pierre, who was more than forty
years her senior but still hale and hearty, with a villa at Cap
Ferrat and a sailing yacht on the Mediterranean, as well as the
charm of a Charles Boyer when he wanted to show it, soon married
Tana. She fitted perfectly into his transatlantic life and
developed her own close friendships with Miró, Zao Wou-ki, and the
other gallery artists who were still alive.
Pierre even allowed himself to lean a bit in a Teutonic
direction for Tana’s sake. I remember meeting him in Vienna
where the Matisses were visiting Tana’s delightful mother,
Countess von Spreti, and Pierre hosted a real “gemütlich” dinner
at “Die Drei Husaren.”
It was only after Pierre’s death in 1989, as one of his
executors, pouring through the effects and documentation of his
long life, that I realized what a great man he had been, how much
of the history of modern art he had affected, how superb had been
his taste.
With very little prodding from me, Tana and Pierre’s children
created the Pierre Matisse Foundation, which secured and put in
order the entire archive of his life and career. They
commissioned the book by John Russell, they chose the Morgan as
the repository which in turn produced the great exhibition
“Pierre Matisse and his Artists” which closes in May of this
year.
Before her own untimely death last year, Tana reestablished a
foundation (Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation) to carry
out her own philanthropic plans. Again, I am an executor and now
a trustee of her foundation. Pierre’s legacy and Tana’s
generosity will be perpetuated as a continuing reminder of
these two remarkable people who never sought any public applause
while they were alive.
Notes
