Matisse: The Late Years – A Reinvention of Modern Art at the Grand Palais
Forget the joy and energy of youth – your best days might yet be ahead. Henri Matisse’s were, even when he barely made it out of surgery alive in his early 70s as war was breaking out across France. Sitting in his wheelchair, his hand wobblier and weaker than ever, his body scarcely able to muster the strength to stand and paint, he reinvented himself and reshaped modern art in the process.
The Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais’ huge exploration of the last years of Matisse’s life – from his surgery in 1941 to his death in 1954 – is a dizzying, joyous celebration of colour, form, line, light and then a whole bunch more colour. It’s a indicate full of hits.
The exhibition begins in a small, almost claustrophobic space, focusing on Matisse’s studio in Nice. Here, he paints still lifes – red tulips and lilac-fleshed oysters, lemons and mimosa, greens and reds and yellows. The looming war over the Riviera casts a shadow, even over these seemingly light and airy compositions. These paintings aren’t simply decorative. they are small, tight, and repeatedly reworked. Matisse obsessively paints the same group of models, shifting them around the room, manipulating light and shadow, creating a cinematic series of stills from the same scene.
But that repetition, coupled with a renewed love of drawing, sparked something new in Matisse. His Themes and Variations series sees him draw the same reclining woman, the same vase of flowers, the same face, over and over, each iteration refining the line, simplifying the image, reducing everything to its essential components. “I have attained a form filtered to its essentials,” he said.
This marks artistic revolution number one. Number two involved abandoning the paintbrush and pen entirely in favor of scissors. This is the late Matisse most recognize – the radical compositions, jagged shapes, and eye-popping Technicolor boldness – and it originates here. In 1944, he was commissioned to create a book about colour, and he far exceeded the brief. The maquettes for that book are filled with swirling leaves, diving bodies, skies of ultramarine blue, funerals in purple, elephants in white, and his striking black Icarus falling past a swirl of yellow stars. He called the book Jazz, as if composing with colour. It’s a remarkable moment in art, beautifully presented, though the accompanying contemporary jazz improvisation felt somewhat intrusive.
Following an air raid on Nice, Matisse moved to Vence in the hills behind the city. He covered the walls of his bedroom with cutouts, floor to ceiling. It’s as if his world expanded as he explored the possibilities of this new approach. He returned to painting, too, creating lighter, airier, simpler works where the shapes in his interior still lifes were reduced and refined. He even stripped away the colour, and even in black and white, they perceive luminous and shocking.
But the cutouts are on another level – ridiculously bold and graphic, direct and bright, and undeniably decorative. You can almost feel the breeze when Matisse recreates the landscape of Polynesia in collages of blue and white, smell the seaweed when he assembles a huge vision of swaying fronds.
As the 1950s began, Matisse was asked to design a chapel in Vence, and he fully embraced the challenge. He created priests’ vestments in green and yellow, and stained glass covered in plant motifs that symbolize his late-life rebirth. This proves religious and spiritual, but not necessarily godly. Staring up at the maquettes and the gleaming stained glass, one isn’t thinking about deities, but rather about the power of art itself.
The famous – and often objectifying – blue nudes reach later, somehow reducing the entire history of nude painting to four of the simplest images imaginable. These are shown alongside a final self-portrait in gouache, which is, unsurprisingly, perfect.
But the show peaks, for many, with a single painting of a face, rendered in black ink on yellow paper. Count the lines: Notice seven. The bare minimum needed to convey a face, to paint a life. At 80 years vintage, sick and weak, Matisse had truly figured it all out.
The exhibition Matisse, 1941-1954
will be on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, from to .