BMA exhibition highlights how Matisse reimagined the Stations of the Cross

Henri Matisse was perhaps the unlikeliest of artists to create the Stations of the Cross.

Though baptized a Catholic, the celebrated French painter was not a religious man. He had little familiarity with the Bible, Christian theology or devotional practice. And for much of his storied career, the modernist master shied away from depicting violence.

What’s even more remarkable is that the Stations of the Cross inherently involve distinct scenes of the Passion – an approach that ran directly against Matisse’s conviction that a work of art must be perceived as a unified whole, taken in at a single glance.

Yet late in life, only a few years before his death, the octogenarian artist poured himself into a masterwork depicting Christ’s suffering and death. What he produced was unlike anything he had created before and strikingly different from how centuries of artists had imagined the Stations.

In spare black-and-white lines – almost graffiti-like in their directness – Matisse grouped all 14 Stations together in an expansive mural more than six feet tall. The images are sketched in a zigzag pattern across gleaming white ceramic tiles.

“I think he had done everything he wanted to do in his life,” said Yve-Alain Bois, professor emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a well-known Matisse scholar. “His painting was at its best ever and I think he wanted to give himself a challenge: ‘Can I do something which I’m so ill-equipped to do?’ ”

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), home to the largest public collection of Matisse’s work in the world, will open an exhibition March 29 featuring a rare group of preparatory drawings for the artist’s Stations of the Cross. The exhibition runs through June 28 and includes more than 80 drawings that trace the development of the monumental work.

Matisse’s finished Stations are part of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France – a project on which he worked from 1947 to 1951. It was the only architectural effort he ever undertook.

Bois, a guest curator of the BMA exhibition, noted that Matisse designed every aspect of the chapel – from the brilliant stained-glass windows to the lamps and even the vestments worn by clergy.

The unusual commission grew out of Matisse’s friendship with Sister Jacques-­Marie, a Dominican religious sister he had previously known as Monique Bourgeois, a nurse who cared for him after he was diagnosed with cancer at age 72. Before entering religious life, Bourgeois had posed for some of Matisse’s works.

When Matisse moved from Nice to Vence in 1943, he reconnected with Sister Jacques-Marie. She asked if he would design stained-glass windows for a garage space the Dominican sisters were using as their chapel. Matisse soon offered to design the entire chapel.

“He was old,” Bois said. “He could barely stand up.”

Because Matisse believed a work of art had to be developed at its full, final size – never enlarged from a smaller sketch – he attached a piece of charcoal to the end of an eight-foot bamboo pole so he could reach the upper sections of the enormous wall-sized composition in his studio.

“It requires a huge amount of strength in your wrist,” Bois said. “To control your gesture at this distance is very hard.”

Katy Rothkopf, Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Director of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies and senior curator of European painting and sculpture at the BMA, said Matisse immersed himself in studying earlier depictions of the Passion. He consulted books, postcards and whatever else he could find showing how other artists had portrayed the events of Christ’s suffering.

“We can look at our photo on the computer and find that Peter Paul Rubens painting in a heartbeat,” she said. “He’s really digging, trying to find not necessarily an example of the exact same moment in Christ’s life, but something that inspires him. The amount of work that went into this is really just extraordinary.”

The BMA drawings, loaned from the Musée Matisse Nice, the Dominican Sisters of Vence and private collections, show how Matisse began with detailed charcoal studies of models posed as Christ and then gradually stripped down the art to the bold simplicity of the finished mural.

Matisse’s painstaking research and preparatory work were bolstered by collaborators who shared his vision. Among them was Dominican Father Marie-­Alain Couturier, a French priest who strongly promoted the introduction of modern art into churches after the Second World War. Religious art in France had long suffered setbacks, Bois said – much of it had been destroyed or looted during the French Revolution, and what the 19th century produced was, in Bois’ words, mostly “extremely mediocre.”

When the chapel was finally unveiled, the Stations drew a divided response. Some, including a number of the Dominican sisters, were unsettled by the raw style. Others were electrified. Pablo Picasso, Matisse’s longtime rival, called them the best thing in the chapel.

In a letter to the chapel’s superior, cited by Bois, Matisse wrote that his Stations depicted “the most profound of human dramas.”

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

If you go

Tickets: $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $7 for groups of seven or more, $5 for students with ID and $5 for youths ages 7-18. BMA members, children under 6 and student groups free

When: Exhibition runs March 29-June 28

Information: artBMA.org

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