This December, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will present Matisse, In Search of True Painting, an exhibition of 50 paintings. The Houston Seminar has invited Rebecca Rabinow, the Met’s co-curator of the exhibit, to come to Houston in September to give our audience a sneak preview of the exhibit.

Matisse continually strove to capture the essence of his subjects and to this end, repeated imagery sometimes as pairs, trios, or series. While this approach is not unique, Matisse’s need to work from one painting to the next is striking and reveals him to be an artist who continually questioned himself and his methods in order to, as he put it, “push further and deeper into true painting.”  The exhibition, currently on view at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, through June 18, will be displayed at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen from July 14 to October 28 before traveling to New York.

Rebecca Rabinow, a curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990. Since that time, she has helped organize seventeen special exhibitions at the museum and assisted with the reinstallation of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries (2007). She is a co-curator of the award-winning exhibition,  The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, on view at the Metropolitan Museum through June 3. She holds a PhD from the Institute of  Fine Arts, New York University, and did her undergraduate work at Smith College. She is a co-author of several exhibition catalogues including Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde and The Steins Collect.