“Find joy in the sky, in the trees, in the flowers. There are flowers everywhere for those who are willing to see them.” Henri Matisse.
The small cut papers take on unexpected forms, a fish, a fabulous animal, or simply a flower. The artist is the one who has kept his childlike soul, said a poet. Henri Matisse fits this definition. The Matisse museum exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, and sculptures by this artist. Are the gouache-painted and cut-out papers preliminary studies for the creation of a major work, or are they finished and complete works in themselves?
The entire exhibition asks us this question. We follow Matisse’s evolution step by step from Still Life with Books 1890 to The Chapel of Vence, the culmination of his work. In 1960, Matisse explained in an interview the link between painting and sculpture: “
Drawing with scissors. Cutting directly into color reminds me of the sculptors’ direct carving.” Thus, he sculpts colors, becomes a sculptor. His cut-outs address the modern painting’s questioning of the relation between drawing and color. With his cut-outs, he resolves once and for all this thorny dilemma. Painting becomes flat, a sort of return to the sources, perspective, volume, and scale no longer matter; only the painting remains, and now it is necessary to go beyond the limits of the frame, to dare something else, and the cut-outs are the solution to this new challenge.
In his apartment at the Regina in Cimiez, the cut papers litter the floor, a child then tries to piece together a puzzle. There are as many colors as pieces of paper, and this child brings them together. But there are the unused pieces, and upon the child’s death, they lie on the floor or are pinned to the wall. The child was Henri Matisse, and the pieces of paper gathered by his family after his death in 1954, relics, and genesis of the artist’s work, are part of his family’s donation to the museum.
This is the subject of this exhibition that the public can discover throughout the summer at the Matisse Museum. Louis Aragon, in one of his books on Henri Matisse, titled a chapter: “The Cut-out Sky” thus paying tribute to the great artist, his cut-outs, and his blue, as he was fascinated by the luminosity of the French Riviera.
This is also the title of this magnificent exhibition not to be missed.
by Thierry Jan.
