Form and color meet in Matisse’s joyous cutouts

Reporting from NEW YORK —  At the end of World War II, when Europe was recovering from the onslaught, the great French artist Henri Matisse was recovering from personal battles. Matisse, then in his 70s, had endured not just the war but also two surgeries and an infection that had left him hardly able to stand, much less paint.

Although confined largely to bed or a wheelchair, Matisse did not stop creating art. Rather, he used what he considered his “second life” to essentially invent a new art form. Aided by dedicated assistants and his own limitless imagination, the artist was cutting paper rather than painting it. Describing his work as “drawing with scissors,” Matisse spent much of his remaining years perfecting the craft of the cutout.

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FOR THE RECORD

Oct. 12, 6:21 a.m.: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Vence, France, on second reference as Venice, Italy.

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About 100 of Matisse’s colorful cutouts are in a landmark exhibition opening Oct. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art and running through Feb. 8. At London’s Tate Modern, where it made its debut this year, “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” was the most popular exhibition in the Tate museums’ history. It is the most extensive show of the artworks ever mounted and the first in-depth look at the cutouts here since 1961.

Organized by MoMA in collaboration with the Tate, the exhibition augments Matisse’s joyous forms with related drawings, illustrated books and designs for the stained glass windows, walls and priests’ vestments at the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France, which the artist considered his masterpiece.

Archival film footage and photographs show the artist in his studio, working with an assistant as he wields his oversized scissors on pre-painted paper to make larger and larger art forms.

Alternating studios in Paris, Nice and Vence, Matisse re-created on studio walls the world he’d once enjoyed outside. He referred, for instance, to a large cutout, “The Parakeet and the Mermaid,” with its leaves and fruit, as “a little garden all around me where I can walk.” He similarly told MoMA’s first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., that the diving and swimming blue forms in “The Swimming Pool” brought to mind the sea, saying, “Now that I can no longer go for a swim, I have surrounded myself with it.”

Museum visitors will also be able to get a sense of Matisse’s studio world through MOMA’s room-size installation of the newly conserved “Swimming Pool,” acquired by the museum in 1975 but not shown for more than two decades. Thousands of hours were spent conserving the actual artwork, its color balance and deteriorated burlap backing, says the museum’s senior conservator, Karl Buchberg, who also wanted to install the cutout at the height and circumstance it was in when Matisse first made it in the dining room of his home and studio at the Hôtel Régina in Nice.

The four-year conservation effort on “The Swimming Pool” sparked the current exhibition, say Buchberg and Jodi Hauptman, MoMA’s senior curator in the department of drawings and prints. “‘The Swimming Pool’ was a kind of lens through which we could see Matisse’s practice,” says Hauptman. “We were interested in Matisse’s ambition and how the availability of the walls to expand his compositions fueled the creation of much bigger works.”

In Matisse’s studio, his assistants would pre-paint large papers with colors he chose, after which he would use scissors or oversized tailor’s shears to shape the form. For smaller cutouts, he would be in his wheelchair, bed or custom-made chair, holding a small board on which he then arranged, pinned, unpinned and re-pinned the pieces. “Then, as the compositions grew in size, they migrated from his lap to the walls,” said Buchberg. “Sometimes too he’d be working on one form, and it would migrate to another composition.”

The curators relied on archival photographs and writings by Matisse, his assistants and others to get a sense of how the artist both lived and worked with his cutouts. “People who know Matisse’s practice often think of a fluid line, whether of pencil or scissors,” says Hauptman. “But when you see the pinholes, you see how many times he would make changes.

“We were interested in the role of drawing in his practice. Matisse was always drawing. He would draw a form again and again, learn it by drawing it, and then cut with ease. He never made a line and cut it out. He always cut freehand. In some cases, the reason he could do it so well is he had thought through it and really looked. To draw birds, for example, he went with an assistant to the garbage dump, because he wanted to see birds and draw them again. When he was making the first ‘Blue Nude,’ he was struggling and took a break to make many drawings of the seated nude. Then he was ready to go, and he cut three others very quickly.”

MOMA, which has long had a relationship with Matisse and his work, also has a set of small pieces of paper that had been left over in the studio. “The colors were not simple,” notes Buchberg. “There were 17 different oranges, for example, and many different greens. The nuance of color, which is one of his great strengths, is also present in the cutouts.”

Curator Hauptman asks and answers the question of whether this period of Matisse’s life is a continuation or radical break. “I think we agree that it is a little bit of both. The cutouts allowed him to address a tension he had felt throughout his career between line and color, drawing and color. He has this beautiful phrase where he describes the cutouts as ‘cutting directly into vivid color.’ This was a way of bringing what he saw as two irreconcilable forms together. It so thoroughly engaged him, and he wanted to push it as far as he could take it.”

The cutouts were also something he’d been experimenting with on and off for decades. Besides his 1947 illustrated book, “Jazz,” also on view in the show, Matisse had successfully used cutouts earlier in various ways.

The artist used cut paper as early as 1919 to design ballet sets and costumes, said Samantha Friedman, assistant curator in MoMA’s department of drawings and print. He also employed the technique in the early ‘30s when designing a three-part mural of dancers for Philadelphia art collector and museum founder Albert C. Barnes and again in the early ‘40s, when he used cut paper to resolve the composition of a still life he was having trouble with.

“He didn’t just decide one day to make a thing called a cutout,” said Friedman. “There was a gradual acclimation to the possibilities of the paper and the medium. When you see the work, it’s so clear this isn’t a question of doing these because you can’t do something else. It’s because you can do something else.”

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