17 April-7 September 2014
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs
“Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” is the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the artist’s paper cut-outs made between 1937 and 1954. 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.
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.
Some of Matisse’s first cut-outs were made between 1943 and 1947 and were collected together in Jazz (1947, Centre Pompidou, Paris), a book of 20 plates. Copies, published by Tériade and featuring a text hand-written by Matisse, are shown alongside the original cut-outs. This will be the first time that the Jazz maquettes and the book have been shown together outside of France.
Other major cut-outs in the exhibition include Tate’s The Snail (1953), its sister work Memory of Oceania (1953, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Large Composition with Masks (1953, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). A photograph of Matisse’s studio reveals that these works were initially conceived as a unified whole. This is the first time these three large-scale works have been exhibited together for over fifty years.
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, Beyeler Foundation, Basel).The works illustrate Matisse’s renewed interest in the figure.
When ill health prevented Matisse from painting, he began to 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. 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.
The 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 exhibition highlights the tensions in the works between finish and process; fine art and decoration; contemplation and utility; and drawing and colour.
“Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” is curated by Nicholas Cullinan, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate with Flavia Frigeri, Assistant Curator, Tate; and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York by Jodi Hauptman, Curator, Department of Drawings, and Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator, with Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator. It will tour to the Museum of Modern Art from 14 October to 9 February 2015.
(adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG United Kingdom
(020) 7887 8888
Hours:
Sunday-Thursday, 10AM-6PM
Friday-Saturday, 10AM-10PM
Image:
The Snail
by Henri Matisse
gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper mounted to canvas
1953
© Succession Henri Matisse/DACS 2013
Courtesy of Tate Modern, London