“I myself have done sculpture as the complement of my studies. I did sculpture when I was tired of painting. For a change of medium. But I sculpted as a painter. I did not sculpt like a sculptor. Sculpture does not say what painting says. Painting does not say what music says. They are parallel ways, but you can’t confuse them.” —Henri Matisse Matisse’s statement, printed high on the wall in the Dallas Museum of Art foyer, sums up the motivation for Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, an ambitious exhibition jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition features over one hundred fifty works arranged to reenact the dialogue between Matisse’s two- and three-dimensional activity, further contextualized by relevant works by fourteen other masters. The purpose is to rectify the predominant view of Matisse as a colorist by focusing on his sculptures, situating them within his own oeuvre and within the history of modern sculpture. Thus Matisse: Painter as Sculptor looks intensively at the artist’s “parallel ways.” His sculpture and painting—to which we must add drawing—complement and inform one another, while remaining adamantly distinct. The quotation reminds us that...