Mixed blessing

The highs, lows, and limits of Modernism -- and private collections

December 29, 2006|Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

Who is Scott M. Black and why is a dreary exhibition of works from his art collection on view at the Museum of Fine Arts? Black is a wealthy financier who runs Delphi Management , a Boston-based investment advisory company, and he is, as a wall text introducing "The Romance of Modernism: Paintings and Sculpture From the Scott M. Black Collection" announces, "a true friend of the museum."

Black has loaned works from his collection to the MFA, has funded an annual lecture series, and is an honorary MFA overseer. He is, in other words, someone with whom the MFA wants to stay on friendly terms .

So, rather than tell him that many of the paintings and sculptures in his collection would be prime candidates for deaccessioning if ever they were bequeathed to the MFA, the museum is giving him a nice, ego-boosting kiss of gratitude in the form of this depressingly uneven, mixed bag of an exhibition.

Fortunately, there are a fair number of keepers in the show, including a soberly realistic 1869 portrait of a woman in a lacy black dress by Renoir, a thinly painted view of reflective water and rural scenery by Monet that shows how intensely responsive to visual reality the great Impressionist could be at his best, and a verdant landscape painted in 1874 by Cezanne when he was spending a lot of time in the company of Camille Pissarro.

Edgar Degas's murky double portrait "Pagans and Degas's Father" has an enigmatic psychological tension, and the picture's unstable composition of tipped-forward furniture and off-center figures facing in opposite directions looks forward to the dynamic flux of Cubism.

One of the gems of the show is a small, bird's-eye view of a bridge over the Seine made in 1900 by Henri Matisse. Its intense colors, stark contrasts of light and dark, and thick, sensuous strokes of paint anticipate the artist's history-changing breakthrough into Fauvism.

Also historically momentous is a small picture of geometrically simplified trees and houses painted in greens and browns by Georges Braque . Made under the influence of Cezanne and Picasso in 1908, it belongs to that heady moment when Cubism was being born, and though it is small and drably colored, it still vibrates with the feeling of revolutionary discovery.

In a small Cubist composition of tubular forms by Fernand Lé ger from 1917, you can also feel the excitement of an artist alive to new possibilities.

If the exhibition consisted only of these and a few other works, it could have been a fine small show, a conservative but still eye- and mind-engaging Modernist sampler. But there are many exceedingly undistinguished things diluting the general impact.