Matisse, Drawing in Three Dimensions,

According to the New York Times, in 1899, at a time when his paintings were showing lots of rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Henri Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected “Jaguar Devouring a Hare,” a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye.

Was the choice a metaphor for gnawing ambition or the artistic survival instinct? Perhaps a bit of both. Matisse was 29 and had spent four impatient years (from 1887 to 1891) as a law student and clerk before his father allowed him to study art full time. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Matisse worked on his big cat for two years, sometimes blindfolding himself to understand his object better and, perhaps, to avoid any inclination to fill in descriptive details.

Matisse’s bronze version of the Barye sculpture is near the entrance to “Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,” a stunning exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Barye is there too. Together they are worth considerably more than a thousand words, however lavished with illustrations those words might be.

Probably the largest consideration of Matisse’s sculpture mounted in this country in about 40 years, this show has been organized by the Baltimore Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art and its neighbor the Nasher Sculpture Center and assembled by Dorothy Kosinski, curator of painting and sculpture at the Dallas Museum; Steven Nash, former director of the Nasher (and now executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum in California); and Jay McKean Fisher, a deputy director and a senior curator at the Baltimore Museum. Working with Oliver Shell, associate curator of European painting and sculpture at Baltimore, Mr. Fisher has supplemented the exhibition of more than 180 works with 30 drawings and prints.

Pride of place in the curators’ elegant installation, which has blessedly few plexiglass vitrines, actually goes to Matisse’s second sculpture, the burly “Serf,” which he began in 1900 after an important visit to Rodin’s studio. Rodin’s headless, armless “Walking Man,” to which it is directly indebted, lurks nearby.

But the Barye-Matisse comparison is more primal in several senses. Mainly, it underscores Matisse’s instinctive rejection of the academic tradition embodied by Barye more effectively than the Rodin-Matisse comparison, partly because Matisse learned a great deal from Rodin.

Matisse’s rejection of Barye was unequivocal. Matisse’s surfaces, so roughly faceted that the jaguar’s back resembles a jagged rock formation, are far removed from Barye’s bravura realism, which banished all signs of the sculptural process in favor of depictions of sinew, muscle and even ribs. And while Matisse’s canvases at the time waffled among different strains of Post-Impressionism — Seurat, Vuillard or Munch — his jaguar pounces on Cézanne, the primary springboard to Modernism.

The two cats convey a galvanizing sense of the revelations of this exhibition, which illuminate how, through an emphasis on process, distortion and distillation, Matisse created a new immediacy in sculpture. Turning to Cézanne several years before Picasso and Braque did, Matisse achieved his own restrained, three-dimensional form of Cubist fragmentation. He emphasized the inert material reality of sculpture by showing it to be a static, energetically handmade object. Yet he also removed it a bit from experience by making his objects, nearly all of which depict women, difficult to grasp as neatly resolved wholes.

Moving around the elegant, pretzel-like S-curves of Matisse’s great bronze “La Serpentine” of 1909, you expect its linear elements to flatten out into a single vertical silhouette from the side. But no. Matisse made sure that the leaning torso, crooked arms and crossed legs just kept rearranging themselves to reveal one unexpected curve after another. Elegance turns insouciant, then sarcastic: The female figure gives Classical contrapposto a pronounced swagger. She is leaning rather than standing on what might almost be a pedestal. Pressing one finger to her cheek, she seems to say, “I guess we won’t need this any more.”