Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954). Two Dancers (Deux danseurs), 1937-38. Stage curtain design for the ballet Rouge et Noir. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, notebook papers, pencil, and thumbtacks. 31 9/16 x 25 3/8” (80.2 x 64.5 cm). Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Dation, 1991. © 2014 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse clearly reveled in moving sensuous, responsive paint across the surface of a canvas. Yet, during the last decade of his long life—born in 1869, he died in 1954—he abandoned this time-honored way of working in favor of arrangements of shapes cut with tailor’s scissors out of sheets of paper painted with gouache. About three decades earlier, in the summer of 1912, Georges Braque had invented collage when he first added a plane of imitation wood-grain paper to a charcoal drawing, forever raising questions about the real and the fictive in modernist art. Pablo Picasso soon adopted his friend’s technique, and, together, the two young men altered the course of Cubist painting by incorporating such detritus of the real world as newspapers, sheet music, and wallpaper into their images. Matisse had been indifferent to the allure of collage in its early days, so it’s not unexpected that his approach to cutting and pasting, as a mature artist, was wholly unlike that of his Cubist colleagues. Far from appropriating fragments of actuality, his painted paper images were constructed with elements that he himself completely shaped and colored. The large-scale works he made with this method, known as the “Gouaches Coupées” (“Cut-Out Gouaches” or more commonly, in English, “Cut-Outs”) are perfect embodiments of “late style”: the uninhibited work produced by a supremely gifted, long-lived artist in his last years; the Cut-Outs are notable for a sense of daring, even recklessness, born of long experience and, perhaps, of an awareness of having nothing to lose. In some ways, the economical, brilliant, and inventive Cut-Outs sum up everything Matisse had been investigating and experimenting with since he found his individual voice at the beginning of the twentieth century; in other ways, they explore entirely new territory. The confrontational, shallow expanses and spreading compositions of the majority of the Cut-Outs suggest a new attitude toward space, one that seems to parallel and even anticipate the declarative all-overness of some of the most radical post-1940s abstraction.

This extraordinary body of work is surveyed in “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” at the Museum of Modern Art.1 It’s a ravishing exhibition that, despite throngs of visitors and a rather crowded installation, provokes admiration for the human capacity for invention and inspires nothing short of awe for the man who made these joyous, unprecedented works. Confronted by the forthright, gorgeously colored Cut-Outs, we admire Matisse’s ability to astonish. We marvel at his boldness and his appetite for visual richness, all undiminished by age and deteriorating health. Unable to work at an easel, confined to his bed and a wheelchair by serious illness and complications following major surgery, the octogenarian Matisse devised a new way of working that allowed him to reinvent and surprise himself, not only by revisiting motifs, such as seated or standing nudes, that he had long explored, but also by entering new territory: evocations of gardens with lush foliage, starlit nights, athletic bathers, stylized flowers, and more. “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” and its informative accompanying catalogue are simultaneously celebrations of the sheer pleasure afforded by these remarkable works and scholarly investigations of the history of the painter’s development and use of the cut-paper method. The Cut-Outs are of such stunning visual power that they demand that viewers look hard at the always surprising arrangements of pattern, shape, and seductive color before them; at the same time the exhibition also raises provocative questions about intention and method. The catalogue answers these questions, with thoughtful essays by the exhibition’s organizers and a wealth of documentary photographs and detailed technical information.

Installation view of The Swimming Pool (1952) in the exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at The Museum of Modern Art, New York Photo by Jonathan Muzikar. © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art

The generating event for the exhibition was the restoration of Matisse’s cut-paper mural The Swimming Pool, originally made in 1952 for the dining room of his apartment in the Hôtel Régina in Nice. Photographs show the two-part frieze, more than fifty feet long overall, wrapping around the room, interrupted by doors, with drawings of heads pinned above and below the relaxed parade of floating female nudes. Some of these agile figures are conjured up with patches of blue paper; others are evoked by the voids created by cutting out the “positive” shapes. These expressive, stripped-down forms tumble against a broad, horizontal band of white paper, sometimes becoming interchangeable with the suggested water patterns and sometimes escaping the confines of white zone, like leaping dolphins. The band evokes the tiled walls of a swimming pool, but the frieze can also be read as bathers frolicking in a stylized, surrogate wave that breaks against the tan fabric of the dining room walls. However we read the images, the mood is one of weightlessness, sensuality, and delight. The Swimming Pool was acquired by MOMA in 1975 and exhibited for almost two decades with the blue elements pasted to the white band, which was attached to an expanse of tan burlap. Last seen in MOMA’s great 1992 Matisse show, The Swimming Pool was found to have suffered from the acidity of the fabric and, to correct the problem, it was removed from view for an intense, delicate conservation campaign. (An interesting video in the current installation sums up the process.) Meticulously restored to near-pristine clarity, the frieze has been reconstructed against burlap of a shade apparently close to the original background color, with the band of bathers installed at the height at which Matisse originally placed it, on walls whose proportions echo those of the room for which the mural was designed. Even more important, the individual elements, pinned to the wall in Matisse’s conception of the piece, rather than stuck down, are once again attached in this provisional way, with the new fasteners carefully positioned in the original pinholes. The Swimming Pool looks wonderful. The colors are clear, the individual elements crisp, and pinning subtly frees the unpredictable shapes of the swimmers, subliminally adding to the sense of unfettered movement that animates the frieze. Only one caveat. It would be nice to be able to sit in the middle of the room, as Matisse must have, at his dining room table, as if we were in the pool ourselves, surrounded by agile bathers in sunlit water; no bench is provided, probably because of the crowds.

The Swimming Pool may be the heart of the show, but the many splendid works that surround the frieze serve as far more than context. The selection includes many of the best known Cut-Outs both from Matisse’s last years and from his earliest experiments with cutting and pasting, so that the installation traces the history of his engagement in paper. He first employed cut-out paper shapes, pinned or thumbtacked to background sheets of paper, as early as the 1930s, usually as preparation for works in other mediums, using the technique not as an end in itself, but rather as a private way of working out alternative possibilities. In 1931, for example, he used cut paper as he developed the eloquent pared-down figures that would inhabit the arched spaces of the mural commissioned by Albert Barnes for his house in Merion, Pennsylvania. At that time, Matisse called no attention to the practice, but in 1937–38, he returned to working with cut paper painted with gouache when he prepared the décor for the ballet Rouge et Noir.

The method allowed Matisse to alter his conception by shifting the location of shapes and to alter the shapes themselves by combining and recombining smaller elements. Such testing of multiple possibilities had been part of his way of working since the beginning of the twentieth century and would be until the end of his life. Change, often radical change, was always an important part of Matisse’s approach, no matter how spontaneous and direct the finished work might seem. In the 1910s and 1920s, he habitually made several versions of a given motif, exploring the implications of his first conception in subsequent iterations that were often far more extreme than the initial image. Later, he frequently had the visible traces of a day’s work on a painting washed off at the end of the session, so that he could begin again freshly the next day, informed but not hampered by his previous efforts. At other times, he used photography to capture the many stages of a picture’s evolution and exhibited this record along with the finished canvas. The seeming spontaneity and directness of Matisse’s mature work was, in fact, hard won—the result of much weighing and rejecting of alternatives. If we look hard enough, we can see that, like the multiple versions and the photographs, the multiple pin holes in the works in “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” vividly tell the story of this complex journey towards apparent simplicity and inevitability.

The exhibition demands that we keep switching gears. First, we revel in the sheer exuberance and the glorious color of the works on view; we mentally retrace the suave contours of the cut-out shapes and we flirt with the inventive allusions to the natural world and the human figure those shapes suggest. It all seems effortless, assured, definitive. But when we come close to the Cut-Outs, we become aware not only of the delicate inflection of the layered paper surface, but also of the labor involved in making these airborne images. We notice unconcealed vestiges of underdrawing. Everything begins to seem contingent, in possible flux. Overlaps and layerings become overwhelmingly important. The exhibition’s film clips and photos of Matisse wielding his scissors like shears or slicing the paper in smooth, continuous swoops, along with glimpses of him directing his assistants, all reinforce our awareness of considered decision-making, without entirely cancelling out the sense of unhampered improvisation. As we move through the exhibition, encountering the original cut- and pasted-paper maquettes for Jazz (1943–1944), with their almost imperceptible surface articulations, the radiant cut-paper studies for the stained glass windows and vestments for the Chapel of the Rosary of Vence (1949), the iconic Blue Nudes (1952), and the large, rhythmically patterned décorations of Matisse’s last few years, with which the installation comes to a triumphant end—not to mention the restored Swimming Pool—it’s impossible to see these works as anything but authoritative and exhilarating. Yet we are also aware that the essential flower shapes, the supple figures, the explosive stars, and the sinuous fronds that have become emblematic of Matisse’s late achievement were not arrived at in single bursts of inspiration, but rather were distilled from repeated investigations of each motif.

We watch as Matisse’s first small paper shapes, painstakingly combined into larger, clearer images designed to be executed in other materials, and sometimes at other scales, give way to more direct efforts. We witness his growing enthusiasm for the special properties of what he called, in the notes to Jazz, “drawing with scissors.” “Cutting directly into vivid color reminds me of a sculptor’s carving into stone,” Matisse wrote, an idea he expanded upon in a later interview: “The contour of the figure springs from the discovery of the scissors that give it the movement of circulating life. This tool doesn’t modulate, it doesn’t brush on, but it incises in.” Matisse continued to create singular images out of multiple cut-out shapes; in the Blue Nudes, for example, the narrow spaces between elements become descriptive drawing. He also often overlapped and juxtaposed planes painted with closely related but slightly varied hues to construct large expanses. And, in addition, he would arrange shapes cut in a single campaign in generous compositions, making their placement and the intervals between them as crucial as their individual contours.

The exhibition is punctuated with photographs documenting Matisse’s original installations of his découpages. We see studio walls covered with unframed, rectangular compositions of large, vegetal shapes and leafy borders, pinned edge to edge. One wall of the show approximates this by bringing together many of the works recorded in a photograph—now isolated in frames—in something like their original relationships. The result reminds us of Matisse’s lifelong fascination with Islamic miniatures. The closely associated, richly patterned Cut-Outs, with their looping curves and lush color disciplined by the geometry of their supports, become modern equivalents for the way the extravagant floral and geometric patterns of tile work and textiles in Persian and Mughal paintings are contained by the flat zones of schematic architecture. Perhaps it was seeing these relatively small works combined into a single, complex scheme that provoked the wall-sized works of Matisse’s very last years, although we cannot ignore the influence of his working on the stained glass windows, vestments, wall “drawings” on tile, and other accoutrements of the Chapel of the Rosary, a vast project that preoccupied him between about 1948 and 1952. Photographs from about 1952 show the walls of the HÔtel Régina apartment covered directly with large leaf shapes, agile blue nudes, and stylized fruit, interrupted occasionally by cut-paper maquettes for stained glass windows. Deeply indented foliage and floating pomegranates drift across two walls, creating a garden habitat for a large abstracted parakeet and a distant blue mermaid, with the fluid arrangement unconfined by boundaries—a kind of sublime, tropical “all-over” painting. Then we encounter the composition itself, mounted on rectangular panels and framed, domesticated and contained. In the 1950s, Matisse spoke often of the “modernity” of murals, which he suggested would supplant the easel painting; he prided himself on being in the forefront of this change. Some of the late large Cut-Outs, such as the Blue Nudes, with their astonishing interplay of positive and negative shapes, are the scale of easel paintings and share the autonomy of the canvas. So do the two great Cut-Out “paintings,” Memory of Oceania (1952–53), with its dialogue between cut-out shapes and drawn lines, and the declarative The Snail (1953). The clarity and frontality of these works seem informed by the unabashed flatness of works such as Large Decoration with Masks (1953), which reads as a modern equivalent of the fabulous tilework of Islamic interiors.

“Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” is an exhilarating, informative, heavily trafficked show, that, we might think, could be neatly contextualized not only by MOMA’s legendary Matisses, but also by the inclusion of artists for whom he was a paradigmatic influence, in the permanent collection galleries. Yet of MOMA’s many works by abstract painters and sculptors who learned from him to make color primary as both a structural element and carrier of emotion, only Helen Frankenthaler is represented—by a 1950s picture, hung with the Abstract Expressionists; her Chairman of the Board (1971), whose fragile lines and staccato color shapes comment on Matisse’s Memory of Oceania, is absent. So are all works by such inventive admirers of Matisse as Hans Hofmann, Milton Avery, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Ellsworth Kelly, and Anthony Caro. A couple of Stuart Davises are on view but not his radiant Visa (1951), which responds directly to the plate Les Codomas, in Jazz. I suppose we should be grateful that a good selection of the permanent collection’s paintings and sculptures by Matisse is up.

1 “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on October 12, 2014 and remains on view through February 8, 2015.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 33 Number 4, on page 24
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