When scissors replaced brushes
Tate Modern opens "most beautiful" show of Matisse cut-outs
London's Tate Modern has opened a blockbuster exhibition celebrating the cut-out works of French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), which made even Picasso jealous.
Tate director Nicholas Serota boasts that the show, which brings together more than 100 works from around the world, “will be the most evocative and beautiful show that London has ever seen”.
Of the vibrant cut-outs, Serota says: “People sometimes say these could be done by a child, but it’s only an old man that has this incredible freedom of mind.”
“It’s a show for the summer,” said Times critic Rachel Campbell-Johnson, one of many British experts enchanted by the explosion of colours in the old power station. “Tate Modern is translated into a sunlit studio in the south of France.”
Curator Nicholas Cullinan took five years to gather the cuttings, which include four of the artist’s iconic “Blue Nudes” and mock-ups of stained glass windows for the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice.
At the end of his life, ravaged by disease and confined to a wheelchair, Matisse became more and more interested in the technique of cutting until scissors finally replaced brushes as his favourite tool.
A film shown in the exhibition shows the artist in his studio, eagerly cutting coloured gouache paper before composing the final works, sometimes huge, with the help of assistants.
“Most artists towards the ends of their life often develop something they call a ‘late style’. If you think about people like Titian or Rembrandt or Monet, as painters their work became more gestural. But what Matisse instead did was to develop an entirely different medium,” Cullinan says.
Matisse’s new direction impressed Picasso, who became jealous of the work when he came to visit his colleague’s Nice studio, according to Cullinan.
“The last 15 years of his life, the works get larger, more ambitious, more joyful, more youthful and it gets better and better – it builds and builds and builds,” said the curator.
“And I think he was very aware he was in a race against time to complete these works” before his death in 1954 at the age of 84.
CUT-OUTS ON THE MOVE
“Henri Matisse: The Cut-outs” runs until September 7 at the Tate Modern and then from from October 14 to February 9 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
