SHOCKING the bourgeoisie is, of course, the stock-in-trade of the Modern movement. Artists may rise from the ranks of the middle class to their Parnassian empyrean, but they look back rarely, and then mainly to spit. In the case of Matisse and Magritte, however, something more complicated is going on. These artists were working from within the bourgeoisie itself, in order not to subvert it but to enrich it. They did this in very different ways. While Matisse, through gentlest persuasion, was making us see the visual world with new eyes, freed from the shackles of convention, Magritte was turning inward to the lunar landscape of dreams, revealing to banker, engineer, and housewife the visions of their sleep. Each artist is now the subject of an excellent and probably definitive exhibition, Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Magritte at the Metropolitan.
It would be hard to imagine an exhibition much better than the one at the Modern. It is a labor of almost pharaonic proportions. Compared by one curator to the D-day invasion, this exhibit brings together almost four hundred of Matisse’s pre-eminent masterpieces, merchandise valued at over $1 billion. Close to a million visitors are expected to pay the ticket price of $12.50. According to the New York Times, this expense, the highest museum admission price ever, here or in Europe, was necessitated by staggeringly high insurance costs.
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