The audio guide to Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art, the irresistibly colorful exhibition at the MIA, opens with an accordion in full musette mode (which may mean something only to accordion nerds like myself). It’s Paris in springtime (we can dream), the Montmartre cafes crowded with artists. You hear from the curator, Erika Holmquist-Wall, Kaywin Feldman (our director), and Matisse experts. And about two minutes in, a Frenchman begins to speak—in Matisse’s own words. If you’ve spent any time exploring the local theater scene in the last 30 years, you know this accent.
Dominique Serrand, cofounder of the late, great Theatre de la Jeune Lune and current co-artistic director of the Moving Company, has played a lot of big personalities in his day, most of them not as normal as Matisse. You may remember him the suavely ridiculous Don Juan in one of the Jeune Lune’s enduring triumphs, Don Juan Giovanni. Or as the beatifically bamboozled Orgon, taken in by Tartuffe, another Jeune Lune classic.
As Matisse, he plays it straight. Reading from the master’s erudite letters, he waxes on the beauty and poise of the Cone sisters (“My two Baltimore ladies…one satisfied and dominating, the other with the majesty of a queen of Israel”). He describes his drawing process (“I usually do the drawings in the evening when it’s too dark to paint. What I’m after is the effect of light and shadow, deliberately leaving color aside”). Among all his colorful artworks, Matisse himself has always been seen in black and white. Serrand makes him human. It’s worth the rent.
And if you want to see Serrand, as well as hear him, watch for the next Moving Company show (it’s Tartuffe!). Or enjoy this clip from last year’s The Family, in which he plays as a comically corrupt French mayor whose nonchalance gets him roughed up by none other than Robert De Niro.