Carving into colour

THE image is as striking as it is unexpected: Henri Matisse aged 80, sitting in a cane wheelchair, slicing giant shears through a sheet of colour held in his left hand. At his feet a litter of bright paper scraps surrounds him; a riot of dancing shapes is pinned to the walls. The photograph, taken by Lydia Delectorskaya, the painter’s assistant and muse, documents the startling originality of his “cut-outs”: vibrant designs of apparent simplicity spooling from a master’s hands in the last decade of his life, each one a tableau of luminosity and power.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries in London, considers them among the 20th century’s most moving works of art. He has long dreamed of mounting this exhibition, which opens on April 17th, bringing 120 pieces to London’s Tate Modern and then, in October, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It will be the first (and quite possibly the last) chance to see these pieces reunited in the whirling profusion with which they first blossomed in the studio.

The show tells the definitive story of Matisse’s lesser-known final chapter through newly discovered photographs and film of the artist at work in his studios in Vence and Nice, on France’s Mediterranean coast, during and after the second world war. Most of the works are so fragile they have never travelled. But the lure of being part of such a comprehensive exhibit persuaded many donors.

Only a scattering of Matisse’s great works on paper has been shown in Britain. This display aims to rectify that. All four of the famous seated “Blue Nudes” will be there, together with the original maquettes for his illustrated book, “Jazz”, and monumental late works like “The Snail” from the Tate and the National Gallery of Art’s “Large Composition With Masks”, not seen together since they were made in 1952. Even those not overly fond of Matisse the painter cannot help but be bowled over by these joyous, sensuous final works.

Seaweeds wave and swallows soar; the limbs of dancers and acrobats loop in arabesques. After a lifetime working against convention, Matisse found in this new medium a unique fusion of line and colour. He was “drawing with scissors”, he said; his gouaches découpées were “the graphic, linear equivalent of the sensation of flight”.

This helps to explain the appeal of these works and their astonishing freshness. Whether whirling with exquisite balance or quite contained, the bold shapes exude energy. Their kinetic power is joined to colours of radiant purity, as if Matisse had sculpted the spectrum itself. Colour had the ability to activate “intimate” emotions, he once said; the cobalt blue he discovered late in life rang for him “like a gong”. At a time of post-war cynicism and darkness, says Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Seligny, chief curator of the Musée Matisse in Nice, he went “towards hope and light with a great deal of force”.

The artist began using cut shapes early, as an aid to composing his paintings and stage sets. Then in 1941 he underwent crucial surgery for abdominal cancer. His recovery marked a rebirth, writes his biographer, Hilary Spurling. The exhibit dedicates a room to each of the two pivotal projects of this period: “Jazz”, and the work Matisse considered his masterpiece, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

The 20 cut-paper designs for “Jazz” are among the most personal of his oeuvre. They blend joyful circus scenes, such as “The Horse, the Rider and the Clown” (pictured) from 1943-44, with more ambiguous images of aggression and loss; the bright yellow stars of “Icarus” can just as easily be read as exploding bombs. Though made while Matisse recuperated, weakness was not the chief reason he turned to this new form. It was, curators and biographer agree, a clear artistic choice. From 1948 until his death in 1954 he focused on compositions of pure colour and light.

The decisive turn was the commission for the Dominican sisters’ chapel above the sea at Vence. No museum exhibition can capture the serenity and beauty of its stained-glass windows. Yet archival photos and preliminary designs for the windows and priestly robes—and the many exuberant works in the galleries that follow—testify to the tremendous creative liberation that this project unleashed.

Matisse’s last years were spent in a fever of cutting and sometimes tearing the double-painted sheets and directing his assistants as they pinned and repinned them to the walls. The surviving photos reveal an entirely new aspect to his process. The cut-outs were not fixed, but fluid in the artist’s mind, with motifs migrating from one composition to another. These build in scale and energy toward the end of the show, from the nudes into the large murals such as “The Parakeet and the Mermaid”. One feels the exhilarating freedom of the mature artist at work, without boundaries or limits. Matisse’s pictorial imagination had expanded to the whole world: “a cosmic space in which I was no more aware of walls than a fish in the sea”.

As his health failed, Matisse surrounded himself with the light and foliage of Tahiti, which he had visited more than two decades before, and the Mediterranean he loved. He cut himself a garden, a lagoon, a swimming pool. Decades before, baffled by criticism of his paintings as perverse, he had told his friends that he dreamed of creating “an art of balance, of purity”. He wanted “anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose” in his art. In this he certainly succeeded.