Matisse: The Cut-Outs
We study Matisse at Art School, we buy digital prints of him for our homes
…But how much has he inspired the artists we work with?
‘I particularly like the Cut-outs, for their simplicity and boldness. It’s impressive that he developed this ‘painting with scissors’ late in life and while being seriously ill. I am very excited about the exhibition and am looking forward to seeing it.’ – Cathrin Walczyk(Print Club artist)
‘Matisse’s colour choices and delicate placement is something that is very pleasing to look at. It is something that I try to replicate in my own work when treating the piece as a whole. I also love how his collages are a little rough around the edges, you can see small rips and cuts, which feels very organic. That is something that I try to bring into my screen print work, where you don’t become perhaps too clean and disassociate yourself from the work. If I was looking to draw inspiration from Matisse’s technique, and having seen videos of him cutting his collages, it would be the way he very organically cuts those shapes, allowing almost the scissors to run where they like. Often when I work images digitally I try and cut shapes loosely so their not too flat, like the shapes of the bottles in this print.’ – Elliot Coffin (Print Club artist)
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (1869–1954) is one of the leading figures of modern art and one of the most significant colourists of all time. A draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor and painter, his unparalleled cut-outs are among the most significant of any artist’s late works. In a career spanning over half a century, Matisse made a large body of work of which the cut-outs are a brilliant final chapter in his long career.
‘Matisse: The Cut-Outs’ is at Tate Modern until 7 September 2014 and it’s the most visually stunning, historically significant and emotionally touching exhibition since 2002’s Matisse Picasso. It brings together around 130 works, many seen together for the first time, in a groundbreaking reassessment of Matisse’s colourful and innovative final works. The exhibition opened its doors on 17 April and will be in cinemas as Matisse Live from 3 June.
Made in the last 17 years of Matisse’s life, from 1937 to his death in 1954, these works are vital, energetic and youthful; acrobats leap, swallows dive, sharks stalk, coffee pots steam, fish fly, blossoms burst open, figures dance, the eye of the sky sends its light into these radiant combinations of high-chrome shapes against burning white ground, and the spirit rises with each new vision, all caught with an incisive snip of Henri Matisse’s dressmaking scissors.
At the age of 71 Matisse underwent surgery that left him wheelchair-bound. No longer able to paint, he began experimenting with cut-outs as a way of playing with composition; he cut into painted paper with scissors to make maquettes for commissions, from books and stained glass window designs to tapestries and ceramics.
In the cut-outs, outlines take on sculptural form and painted sheets of paper are infused with the luminosity of stained glass. He would cut straight into coloured paper: yellow, pink, teal, purple, blue, orange and black. Using colour, Matisse evokes the convulsive surface of water and the lushness of vegetation. The result reflected both a renewed commitment to form and colour and an inventiveness freshly directed to the status of the work of art.
It was when making the book Jazz (1943–6) that instead of a means to an end, Matisse began to see cut-outs as works in their own right. Commissioned by arts publisher Tériade, the book is illustrated by 20 Matisse cut-outs depicting members of the circus. Knife throwers, sword swallowers, swimmers, trapeze artists, clowns and elephants explode from the page.
In Icarus (1943) the ill-fated mythical character tumbles through a royal blue sky studded with stars, a ruby red spot covering his heart. Made in the context of the Second World War, could the stars be explosions, the red mark a bullet hole, the falling silhouetted figure, probably a corpse.
Oceania, the sky (1946) and Oceania, the sea (1946) are inspired by Matisse’s 1930–1 trip to Tahiti. Assorted marine forms float, cut from white paper on a taupe background. When first made, these delicate cut shapes were not glued to the studio wall, but were pinned where they would ripple like the ocean in the balmy Vence summer breeze.
The show includes the largest number of Matisse’s Blue Nudes ever exhibited together, including the most significant of the group Blue Nude I (1952). Four Blue Nudes are displayed together, complemented by bronze, chunky, modernist sculptures from the early 1930s. It is fascinating to note that in one composition, Blue Nude IV, Matisse used multiple different pieces of blue paper stuck together to get the shape correct: a thigh is widened, a foot altered, a knee patched. The other three, by contrast, are each made from a single cut of blue paper, sleek, sculptural and confident.
A photograph of Matisse’s studio reveals the visitors that these works were initially conceived as a unified whole. This is, in fact, the first time these large-scale works have been exhibited together for over fifty years. The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952), covers an entire wall with sharp slices of colour. The Snail (1953) is moving in its urgency. Completed the year before Matisse’s death, chunks of colour seem hastily collaged together – as though Matisse realised there wasn’t much time left. Its sister work Memory of Oceania (1953) and Large Composition with Masks (1953) are also breathtaking.
This fantastic exhibition re-examines the cut-outs in terms of the methods and materials that Matisse used, and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and ultimately as permanent works through mounting and framing. The show also highlights the tensions in the works between finish and process, fine art and decoration, contemplation and utility, and drawing and colour.
Matisse once said: ‘It will only be much later that people will realise to what extent the work I am doing is a step in the future’ and you don’t want to miss that, do you?
We’ll meet you guys in the garden…
