Henri Matisse, “Young Sailor II,” 1906
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was given a paintbox by his mother as a diversion. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed the course of art. As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting.

His early stylistic experiments have inspired the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. This chronological installation of nearly 50 paintings focuses on series of works—especially pairs of canvases—that show the artist consciously thinking through issues of composition, and ways to give his color full voice. The thrill of the show is that, as Matisse instructs himself, he instructs us too, in the language he knew best.

Matisse’s formidable powers are evident from the start. Hanging alongside a vivid still life from 1899—painted in heightened impressionist hues—a second version somehow preserves much of its weightiness of forms even though reduced to flat, planar colors. Nearby, a Cézannesque still life hangs next to a pointillist version of the same setup. A brushy image of a seated sailor, rendered in a subdued palette, hangs next to one with almost crystalline shapes in blazing Fauve hues. What all these paintings share is an eloquence of colors—or, more exactly, a poignant measuring of the intervals between them.

In 1907-8, Matisse painted two remarkable versions of “Le Luxe,” depicting a standing figure with two attendants. The first has deliberately modeled volumes, but the second’s unmodulated color planes are enough to capture the verticality of the standing figure—the sensation of looking up at her head, and down to her feet, her height measured out by color-charged bands in the background. The artist makes the pose momentous with minimal modeling—much as did Giotto and Duccio, two early Renaissance artists whose works Matisse had admired that summer in Italy.

Henri Matisse, “Le Luxe I,” 1907
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There was no turning back. In one of two stunning paintings from 1914, a window’s cool light gently suffuses a studio view, but the artist’s drawing expands the space almost violently, anchoring a chair and bowl at the bottom, while planting, at our eye level, a distant tower rhyming with the window’s vertical partition. In the second canvas, by contrast, sunlight splashes forcefully across the floor, tracing deep shadows. Elements are rendered more harshly, even irrationally, yet the means are the same: the re-creation of a scene by observing a particular light, and cajoling the forms within into life.

The last galleries include the hieratic, flattened figures, still lifes and interiors from the late ’30s and ’40s, along with four series of photographs of paintings in progress, which afford a gratifying, over-the-shoulder view of the artist at work.

In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents. Oh yes, he also knew a thing or two about color.

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., through March 17.

People entering their retirement can expect a shift from constant work to spending more time developing their creative talents. Many seniors spend their golden years learning how to paint, draw and make pottery at local art classes.

Dr. Gail Lowenstein, a geriatrician and concierge doctor serving the North Shore of Nassau County and the surrounding area, explained that once people retire, they tend to lose their sense of purpose and begin searching for something to fill the gap.

She shared the story of a man who lost his wife and started to paint. Even though he had never painted before, this gentleman had the urge to create artwork and donated it to local charities.
“He found his purpose, and it saved him and got him through a difficult time,” she said.

Throughout Manhattan, there are many places that give seniors the opportunity to embrace the art world by creating their own masterpieces.

For the past 10 years the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, located on Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street, has offered numerous art programs, including a class specifically designed for seniors. Elders learn how to paint and draw, with the use of still life and photographs.

Accomplished artist Gene Wiseniewski teaches the class and explained that the program is open to anyone over the age of 50, regardless of prior experience in painting. He also noted that some skilled painters use oil paint while others prefer acrylics.

The program has been a success for the past the few years, and is offered three times a year on Fridays from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

“Seniors are the best to work with, because they are very serious, but they also know how to have fun. They are very inspirational too,” Wiseniewski said.

Another location on the Upper West Side is the Art Students League of New York, which offers a range of classes for those looking to kick-start their creative impulse. For more than 100 years, the league has taught the language of art. Some of America’s most prominent artists have studied at this school, including Georgia O’Keefe, Norman Rockwell and George Bellows.

“Most of our 100 studio classes in drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture include students ranging in ability from beginners to established artists and ranging in age from their twenties to folks in their seventies and eighties,” said Ken Park, the school’s director of communications.
For seniors who are interested in the arts but not necessarily in making art, they offer a seminar series that discusses classic art and artists through literature.

“Folks love the camaraderie and community of the League. Students learn not just from the professional artist-instructors but also from other students,” Park said.

Putting a spin on art classes is Mugi Pottery, located on Amsterdam Avenue between 108th and 109th streets, which teaches individuals how to mold clay while on a spinning wheel. Mugi’s adult classes allow anyone from the age of 16 and up, but many seniors enroll in the classes.

Offering classes for people ranging from 2 to 102 years old, the Art Studio NY, located on West 96th Street, provides unique painting and drawing classes in an intimate classroom. For beginners, the school offers basic classes such as Oil Painting 101 and Portrait and Figure Painting 101.

Whether it is drawing, painting or sculpting, seniors are exploring and enjoying different aspects of art. By doing so, they are not only learning something new, they are remaining active and continuing to live a healthy, vibrant lifestyle.

At a time when performance art, contraptions and conceptual art continue to dominate the contemporary museum scene, it’s a pleasure to find an artist who actually paints, draws and makes prints. Nicole Eisenman is not the only one, of course-—the vast majority of galleries still show works on paper and canvas. But the aura of hipness has hovered for a long time.

At the Whitney Biennial this spring, Eisenman commanded two large walls and then some with a couple of oil paintings and 36 colorful monotypes depict- ing the human form and face. Finding Eisenman’s engaging monotypes among the installations and manifestos felt like coming upon a patch of African violets sprouting in field of cacti.

In Eisenman’s atmospheric and darkly funny works, figures dance, make love, scowl, drink, drive cars, send text messages, cry, masturbate and contemplate death. Her exaggerated lines, intense colors and high emotions can be satirical, bitter and angry, and there are echoes of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Philip Guston—-so much so that the artist sometimes risks seeming retro. She admits how closely she’s studied the expressionists, Picasso and—-surprisingly-—the impressionists, including Renoir.

At 47, Eisenman has had a robust career for more than a decade and keeps on winning critical acclaim. Before the Biennial closed in May, she’d opened her fifth solo show at Chelsea’s Leo Koenig gallery. In The New Yorker, she was hailed as the most prominent of a new generation of expressionists, most of whom are women.

Eisenman, who is gay, often portrays herself and her friends at bars and parties. Some recent etchings feature women draped over wine bottles and beer mugs, bringing Picasso’s Blue Period to mind. But Eisenman’s identification with Picasso and the expressionists is fraught with contradictions, given that these otherwise great artists abused women both on and off their canvases. Those sorry chapters in art history leave feminist artists-—and what artist worth her salt today isn’t one?-—in a tortured conundrum with no easy way out.

As a queer critic of American culture, Eisenman is quick to parody machismo. In “Captain Awesome,” a painting from 2004, a shirtless dude with his baseball cap on backwards stands in front of a phallic silo, holding an ear of corn and giving the thumbs up sign. It’s creepy, true and far too easy. But a recent lithograph of a disheveled old man holding his own shadow is more nuanced. In fact, some of Eisenman’s finest works, like her 2012 etching “Portrait of Evan,” have been of men.

To grasp how far Eisenman departs from some of her contemporaries, one need only consider the 2012 Biennial, where the Whitney asked their artists to participate in programs to educate the public about their work. Mostly, this involved a lot of talk. Some artists joined panel discussions; others wrote essays, staged happenings or made videos to explain themselves. Eisenman did something radical. She handed sketchpads and charcoal to the crowd and brought in some naked models. Then she told everyone to start drawing.

Kusama moves beyond pop

What kind of pop artist “does battle at the border of life and death”? Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who so described her art-making in 1961, suggests a Japanese Andy Warhol in terms of sheer energy, protean endeavors and fixation with publicity. But Warhol would never have professed such high purpose.

Indeed, the Kusama revealed by the current Whitney retrospective defies any single label. Despite her friendships forged in the ’60s with Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Cornell, her work leapfrogs categories like pop, minimalism and conceptual, revealing an honest vulnerability seldom seen in her male colleagues.

The museum’s front windows, crammed with the giant, bobbing spheres of her “Dots Obsession” (2009/2012), offer an instant dose of her signature polka-dotted installations. It’s only a foretaste, though, of the six decades of painting, sculpture, collage, film, performances, installations, fashion design and writing displayed or documented on the fourth floor.

Kusama’s “Infinity Net” paintings, her early nod to abstract expressionism, fill one gallery with countless swirls of white, subtly tightening and expanding across wide surfaces. She shifted gears with the “Accumulation” sculptures that appeared in some of the first exhibitions of pop art. These monochromatic works encrust various items—chairs, shoes, rowboat, ladder, hat, suitcase—with multitudes of stuffed fabric phalluses. The fidgety, potato-like protuberances have an awkward intimacy very foreign to pop and minimalism. A variation of these “Sex Obsession” sculptures, dubbed by Kusama the “Food Obsession” works, covers objects with macaroni.

Also on view is Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, her 1967 film showing her fiercely applying polka dots to animals and naked, carousing humans. But it took her “Anatomic Explosions” to put the self-styled “Priestess of Nudity” on the front pages. For these public performances, the artist hastily painted spots on nude dancers until the police showed up. The press releases and flyers combine ’60s breeziness with equal dollops of hucksterism and galactic purpose: “Become one with eternity. Obliterate your personality…take along one of our live bikini models.”

On a more poetic level, colorful mixed-media works on paper from the 1970s combine images of faces, insects and flowers with surprising delicacy. By this point, though, museum visitors may be wondering: How long can a soul publicly obsess about its own obsessions? Only so long, it seems; having returned to Japan, Kusama voluntarily entered a mental hospital in 1977, where she resides to this day.

Thankfully, it has been a nourishing environment. The vaguely biological forms of her large canvases and soft sculptures from the ’80s and ’90s glow with asexual sensuousness. Though frankly decorative, the seething, micro-dotted tentacles of “Yellow Trees” (1994) mesmerize. On the first floor, standing in for the enclosed installations produced since the ’90s is “Fireflies on the Water” (2002), from the Whitney’s own collection. Its coolness factor—with lights seeming to shimmer infinitely in all directions—-is not to be missed.

Pacing the exhibition are numerous photographs of the artist posed next to her work in matching attire. Apparently, notions of art and celebrity were as inseparable for Kusama as they were for Warhol. But Kusama’s motifs seem purer, and her emotional life—with joys and mortifications strangely fused—more accessible. One senses that when she appropriated, it was not for ironic effect but simply to cope. Hence her exploitation of the gestalt of the ’60s, and later, perhaps, of stylistic aspects of Cornell, Nevelson and Eva Hesse.

Today, Kusama is as much life force as artist—if we still distinguish the two—and uncannily predictive of the ascendancy of younger artists like Takashi Murakami. But her triumph illuminates a certain diminution, too, of our expectations of art.

Yayoi Kusama
Through Sept. 30, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., 212-570- 3600, whitney.org.

The Chinese invented woodblock printing. And in China, printing very quickly took on religious implications—Buddhism teaches that reproducing sacred texts is a way to receive blessings, so printing became a way to receive blessings while spreading the state religion.

The exhibit starts with a room of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-century prints of the Buddha with short texts. There are a few standouts, like the luxuriously painted “Banner with Bodhisattva.” But after a while, most of the prints start to take on the sameness of dollar bills—they’re spiritual currency.

The show moves on to the Ming period (1368-1644), where prints of leaves and flowers are executed with military precision. The period saw a big growth in literacy and wealth; at the same time, color printing took off. The exhibit includes many examples from the Ten Bamboo Shoots Collection of Calligraphy and Painting, a manual for artists full of lichen-covered stones and vines.

Color printing flourished into the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), whose Manchu rulers gave away prints to their guests to show off their power. The Qing period verges on the garish; loud pinks and greens, overflowing fruit plates and flower baskets all scream money.

The warmest pieces in this show are the so-called popular prints, which ordinary people bought to hang in their homes. Most are “door guardians” from the late 19th century, round-cheeked generals and kitchen gods with open, cartoonish faces. There are a few moving, expressionistic woodcuts from the revolutionary period, too. And the show does include some exciting works from the 1980s and beyond, notably Chen Haiyan’s “Dream,” an evocative swirl of animals on a black cloud, and Wu Jide’s “Fleeting Years.”

But these pieces beg the question: why isn’t The Met giving these artists an exhibit of their own? We would never see contemporary French or Italian artists wedged into a show of this historic scope. Contemporary Chinese artists deserve the same respect we give their Western counterparts.

The Printed Image in China: 
8th-21st Centuries 
Through July 29, The Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 
212-923-3700, www.metmuseum.org.

Young artists will get the chance to work in studios such as these at the National Academy.

The National Academy Museum & School of the Upper East Side, located at 5 E. 89th St. off 5th Avenue, is celebrating 20 years of children’s summer programs. The school itself has been instilling the intricacies of fine and classical arts into fledgling artists since 1826.

“Our young people’s program is one of the best-kept secrets in the Upper East Side,” said Lotus do Brooks, one of the instructors in the program.

This summer, the school will continue its tradition of offering a full day art camp for youngsters and intensive art workshops for high school students who wish to live their summer through the artistic eye.

“This is a small environment,” said Maurizio Pellegrin, the director and one of the instructors of the Academy. “It is very well organized, with a dynamic structure that offers classes to professionals and to people who come for the love and passion.”

The program is separated into three classes that are available for six weeks starting June 11, though the students have the choice to stay for one week or all six, according to Brooks. Tuition for the summer camps is $450 per week, and the workshop will run for $250 per week.

The National Academy will host Martha Bloom, a professional who has over 30 years’ art experience under her belt. She will preside over the Art and Drama program, which is open to kids ages 6 to 10 and prompts them to explore the multiple avenues of creativity housed within their developing minds as painters and performers. This class serves as an introduction to several art styles such as drawing, painting, collage, printmaking and drama. The students will have an opportunity to work outside and they will also host miniature exhibitions of their work. The classes run June 11–29 and July 9–27 from 9 a.m. through 4 p.m.

The second class being offered is suited for children 9 to 13 years old and discusses the finer points of painting and drawing, such as lighting, shading and perspective. Hannah Frassinelli, an established teacher and award-winning printmaker, will guide her students through the Painting and Drawing camp with self portraits and a clothed model to give the fledgling artists an introduction to the human figure.  The students will also work in printmaking and study the concept of the still life and landscape painting. This set of classes will begin June 18 and continue until the 29th. The second set of classes begins July 9 and ends on the 20th.

The final class to be offered for the summer will be a Watercolors Workshop taught by Brooks, who is part of the teaching staff at the Dalton School and has been training and teaching the fine arts for well over 20 years. This class acts as a foundation for high school students to build their portfolios, which will prepare them for college, when they must submit samples of their current work. Students will delve into watercolors to create landscapes of nature and the city. The students will also be given the chance to visit several art galleries and museums in the area. The class will be begin July 30 and continue through Aug. 3 from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. Tuition for this class will be $250 per week.

The school is surrounded by museums and art galleries, such as the Guggenheim, which is but a stroke of a paintbrush from the school. The teachers utilize this to the fullest extent, taking its students out of the studios and into the galleries to marvel at the works of great artists.

“We are in the center of New York City, one of the major art cities of the world,” said Pellegrin.