About the Matisse exhibition

During his early stays in the Mediterranean basin, Matisse discovered a unique light that left a deep impression on him and encouraged him to break free from drawing in order to liberate color on the canvas. Initially attracted to divisionism, in 1904 in Saint-Tropez he explored a personal way of fragmenting the brushstroke in Luxe, calme et volupté. But the following year, in Collioure, the light acted as a revelation: alongside André Derain, he abandoned pointillism in favor of flat areas of pure color and intense contrasts. The work marked a major turning point and paved the way for Fauvism.

At the turn of the 1910s, Henri Matisse went through a period of intense creativity. In 1909, Russian collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned him to create two monumental panels for his palace: La Danse and La Musique. In Dance (III), five nude figures form an open circle, symbolizing joy and vitality. Against an azure blue sky, Matisse radically simplified the forms and limited his palette to a few pure colors, creating an almost archaic and universal vision. Presented at the Salon d'Automne in 1910, the work caused a scandal before being defended by its patron.

During the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse created monumental cutouts in gouache-painted wallpaper. In La Gerbe, the material becomes pure, vibrant color. Using scissors to “draw” directly in the color, he cut out organic, fluid shapes that he assembled into a dynamic composition. The space surrounding the shapes is as important as the shapes themselves: the solids and voids interact in a chromatic exaltation that synthesizes all his years of exploration.

He explains his creation of The Snail, a chromatic composition, in these terms: "First, I drew the snail from nature, holding it in my hand. I became aware of a process unfolding, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took up the scissors." He combines complementary colors (red and green, orange and blue, yellow and purple) to give the spiral a sense of dynamism.

Flowers symbolize vitality for him. They allowed him to play with intense, contrasting colors and dynamic compositions. 

For Matisse, the studio was a veritable inner world. He decorated it with plants, fabrics, objects brought back from his travels, and his own works, which he moved from one place to another. This space thus became a familiar setting and a constant source of inspiration. By painting his studio, Matisse created a form of self-portrait, revealing his intimate relationship with color and composition. The Red Studio, painted in 1911 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, brings together several works painted between 1898 and 1911, integrated into a vast red field that transforms the space into a unified vision. For example, we can recognize Les Baigneuses and Le Luxe (II), as well as a plate painted by the artist in 1907. Rejected by Shchukin, the painting then circulated in major international exhibitions before joining a private collection and being acquired in 1949 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. From that date onwards, painters, critics, and visitors stopped in front of this work, whose chromatic audacity and simplification of space suddenly seemed visionary. For many, L’Atelier rouge heralded a new direction that would soon take the American art scene by storm: colorful abstraction.

In 1930, Henri Matisse received a commission from Albert Barnes to create a mural for the Barnes Foundation. Taking up the theme of dance and movement, he designed a monumental work measuring 52 m². After an initial version was deemed insufficiently decorative, he used cut-out colored paper, which he placed and rearranged on the surface before painting the final composition. In La Danse, color transforms the architecture into an immersive space: pink harmonizes with blue, and fragments of bodies extend the movement beyond the frame.

During this period, Matisse collaborated with the literary and artistic journal Verve, founded in 1937 by the publisher Tériade, with whom he published the book Jazz in 1947. He used the technique of cut-out gouache papers, then engraving to reproduce this work, which brings together colorful plates and pages of writing. He began to imagine a universe of curves that cut through the black, creating a striking contrast and highlighting the subtle movements of the artist's hand. Matisse wrote about Jazz: “Cutting sharply into color reminds me of the direct carving of sculptors. This book was conceived in that spirit.”