In the fall of 1973, when William Acquavella was just 35 years old and working at his father's art gallery in Manhattan, he remembers looking out the window one rainy morning and seeing a line of people wrapped around the block waiting to see a Matisse exhibition that had just opened there.
"That show attracted lots of artists," Acquavella recently recalled. "Richard Diebenkorn came every day; Calder was a regular too.''
When it opened, The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote that "the exhibition dominating the art calendar this week is, without question, the Henri Matisse show at the Acquavella Galleries,'' where, he teased, "there are unexpected revelations to be gleaned....''
More than five decades later the 88-year-old dealer is at it again. For the last two years, working with his three children -- Eleanor, Nicholas and Alexander -- and Emily Crowley, the gallery's director and curator -- he has been organizing "Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony,'' an exhibition opening April 9 that includes more than 50 paintings, sculptures and works-on-paper from public and private collections, many of which have rarely been shown before. "The time just felt right,'' he said during a recent visit.
James Rondeau, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, agrees. "Matisse once famously said painting is like a good armchair. And in these troubled times that appears to be exactly what the public is craving.'' Ever since "Matisse's Jazz: Rhythms in Color,'' opened at the Art Institute on March 7 visitors have been waiting up to 90 minutes on line to see the show. "That rarely happens here,'' Rondeau said. That's likely because this is the first time since the museum acquired the artist's series of cutouts in 1948 that "Jazz'' has been on view in its entirety. Call it the Matisse Moment: This spring along with the snowdrops, crocuses and budding trees, have come a global surge of exhibitions highlighting the master of color and pattern.
Most prominently there's a major show of the artist's late works currently on view in Paris, a collaboration between the Pompidou Center (whose building is currently under renovation) and the Grand Palais. Closer to home, the Baltimore Museum has an exhibition of about 80 drawings by the artist that inspired his monumental, spiritually expressive mural "Stations of the Cross.'' And on May 9, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is opening "Matisse's Femme au Chapeaux: From Scandal to Icon,'' a show exploring the impact of the celebrated painting of Amélie, the artist's wife.