Henri Matisse seems inescapable this year, with museum shows at the Grand Palais in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. There’s even one at the Morris Museum, in Morristown, New Jersey, with 71 Matisse drawings from the Mourlot family archive on display. The Mourlots were master lithographers, and the show documents the production of the artist’s books, which preoccupied him during his last 15 years.
And yet, there’s still something about Matisse that feels overlooked and underappreciated. That may be because there’s not much Matisse appearing on the auction market—and the artist’s top prices seem to lag far behind those of his peers. Nine-figure Picassos don’t sell at auction every day, but there have been five of them in the past 16 years. Contrast that with David Rockefeller’s Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, from 1923, which attracted only $80 million in 2018—still the highest price paid for a Matisse painting at auction.
Not that there hasn’t been some stirring in the auction market. Last season, surprise bidding wars broke out for Robert and Patricia Weis’s Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre), from 1937, which was estimated at $15 million but ended up selling for $32 million. The 1920 work Nu au Fauteuil, main gauche sous la tête, from Japan’s Kawamura Museum, was priced at $2.5 million but sold for nearly $6.8 million. Those results also point to something peculiar to the Matisse market: Auctions are not where the action is. Whether that’s because the best Matisse works are already in museums or the kinds of collections that just never sell, I don’t know.
What I do know is that the Acquavella family very deliberately chose this moment to mount a valedictory show of 50 Matisse works. These are mostly paintings and sculptures plus a few drawings, the bulk of which 88-year-old paterfamilias William Acquavella has owned, sold, or brokered during his long and almost accidental career as an art dealer.
“High Concentration of Risk”
Nicholas Acquavella, who works at the gallery along with both of Bill’s other children, gave me a tour of the show on Wednesday. The sheer number of high-quality works was overwhelming. At one point during our conversation, I remarked on the show’s relatively short running time—it closes on May 22. The younger Acquavella explained that it’s a big ask to get clients to lend even for a few months. Then he stopped and pulled himself upright. “The insurance costs alone,” he added, his eyes widening in astonishment.
Indeed, at this moment, the gallery is what the insurance people call a “high concentration of risk.” Between the loans from MoMA, the Met, the Philadelphia and Cleveland museums of art, the Phillips Collection, Glenstone, and many private collections, the amount of high-value art in this one place should make anyone nervous. I was a little jittery, myself.
That said, if the Acquavellas are willing to shoulder the cost and put in what must have been a lot of time calling in favors, the rest of us should take advantage. I had to stop by again on Thursday, and I’m sure I will try to come back a few more times, depending on the crowds.
The show is divided into four rooms. To the right, just as you enter the grand, high-ceilinged former townhouse on 79th Street, there’s an intimate gallery of six works: Madeleine I, a bronze cast in 1901, along with a drawing, “Study for Madeline,” from the same year; a painting of a male nude from 1900 paired with another bronze of the same model from 1900-04; and two fauvist portraits of women from 1905 and 1906. The earlier one, still luminous in orange tones, was sold to its present owner in the early 1960s—a testament both to the strength of the Acquavellas’ relationships and to how much collectors cherish these works.
On the same floor, there’s a gallery with a number of female nudes. In addition to the Rockefeller odalisque, there are two remarkable reclining nudes—one a small painting with an orange background, the other a detailed drawing. The show also has several other elaborately finished drawings, the kind you rarely see at auction. Nick pointed that out to draw attention to the gap between the private market, where many of these trophies trade, and the auction market, where one often sees lesser-quality Matisses.
A case in point: At the back of the gallery, the Acquavellas have created a chapel-like space for a complete set of the artist’s famous bronze backs, bas-relief sculptures of a woman’s back in four states. You can see another set in MoMA’s garden or at the Hirshhorn when its sculpture garden reopens soon. The set on display here, mounted in front of rich brown walls that bring out the brown in the bronze, was on loan to a museum in Texas for many years. It was only when Leon Black paid nearly $50 million for a single back that these four unexpectedly came to market. The sellers first tried to auction them for an astonishingly high number, but it took Bill Acquavella’s man management skills to get the deal done privately at a nine-figure price that satisfied everyone.
Upstairs, there’s a room dominated by a set of bronze heads that Acquavella sold to Glenstone. The room is also lined with works of exceptional provenance, including a strong painting of a seated female nude viewed from behind. (Nick told me they were keen to hang this with the bronze backs but couldn’t make it work.) The final room of the show is the jackpot, featuring the works that immediately spring to mind when you think of Matisse—interiors dense with decorative patterns centered on female figures. The draftsmanship is loose but the fidelity is true to life.
After seeing the show, I couldn’t help looking up Matisse’s auction history. There I found records for a number of the works on display that were auctioned, often at surprisingly low prices, as early as 1985 and as late as 2019. It reminded me that there is a subtext to all of this. The Acquavellas are patient art dealers, who make their money by buying and then selling works over time, often with a significant gap in between.
This is the old style of art dealing, which befits a firm now deep into its third generation. You buy works when they come up—with luck, at a time when no one is excited about Matisse. Then you sell them to the right person who is excited to get one, especially from the firm with a reputation for brokering the best works. That’s the message of the show: If you’re patient—and have a good eye—you can get in on the good stuff.
