London and New York

by Elizabeth Cowling

The exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, recently at Tate Modern, London (closed 7th September), and opening later this month at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (12th October to 8th February), is a triumph for its organisers, who have gathered together a comprehensive collection of these extremely fragile works, including enormous murals that normally never leave their permanent homes.1 Following a broadly chronological path, the installation at Tate Modern, where this reviewer saw the exhibition, was at once enlightening and imaginative, grounded in the well-documented history of the development of Matisse’s unique gouache découpée technique but exciting in its twists and turns and changes of rhythm. One of many high points was the intimate, cubic room in which the four strikingly volumetric Blue nudes (1952; cat. nos.107 and 109–11) were jux­taposed with four earlier but conceptually related sculptures. The intensity of this inspired constellation, presented only in London, was enhanced by the contrast with the previous, much larger gallery devoted to such brilliantly coloured, essentially pictorial compositions as Zulma (1950; no.84) and Creole Dancer (1950; no.85). A feeling of surging vitality emanated from the concluding sequence of galleries dominated by the great decorative compositions Matisse created in the astonishingly fertile period that followed the consecration of the Vence Chapel in June 1951. The chapel’s interior, gloriously flooded as it is with coloured light streaming through the stained-glass windows, is uplifting in its beauty, and many regard it as Matisse’s supreme achievement. Sad to say, the room devoted to the chapel at Tate Modern was a let-down, despite the presence of some splendid cut-paper maquettes for the windows and chasubles. The lighting, always relatively low for conservation reasons, was dreary there and the huge charcoal study on brownish (presumably darkened) paper for the ceramic wall decoration with the Virgin and Child (c.1950; no.76) contributed to the bleak effect. Let us hope that in New York, where a different combination of studies will be shown, the chapel will fare better. 

Inclusiveness and spectacle aside, the curators have an explicit agenda: to probe the ‘physicality’ and ‘process of making’ of Matisse’s cut-outs in the belief that their deepest ‘lessons’ lie in his dynamic, explor­atory methods and the state of perpetual flux within his studio, rather than in the signed-off, framed-up products.2 In London, insight into Matisse’s basic materials was provided in a fascinating study section packed with maquettes for exhibition posters and book, catalogue and magazine covers, and cabinets containing, inter alia, the scraps of painted paper he kept for reference purposes, and trial pieces of coloured glass from the Paul Bony atelier where the windows of the Vence Chapel were produced. Detailed technical information, based on the latest research, is presented in an admirably lucid catalogue essay by a team of conservators, who summarise every stage in the creation of a cut-out, from the choice of paper and gouache paints to the permanent mounting of the finished compositions in the Parisian atelier of the art suppliers Lefebvre-Foinet – an operation supervised by Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite Duthuit, and Lydia Delectorskaya, the beautiful Russian woman who had modelled for him in the 1930s and sub­sequently became his constant companion and the indispensable manager of his studio.3 The typical division of labour between Matisse and his collaborators is clar­ified once and for all, and it emerges, for example, that although the young women who assisted him in the studio were instructed to use a particular method when brushing gouache on the sheets of paper, they were free to apply it according to their personal preference for opacity or transparency.4 Matisse demanded total commitment from them and, increasingly housebound and bedridden, also expected them to be an inspiration – like the philodendron plants, flowers, pigeons, textiles and objets d’art that made up his world. If their zeal and energy waned, they were dismissed. Rushes from Frédéric Rossif’s never-completed film of Matisse at work on maquettes for the Vence Chapel in 1950 brought that intense dependency to life, and in a riveting sequence shot by Adrien Maeght a couple of years later we see Matisse engaged in a kind of pas de deux with one of his assistants, swiftly cutting out a many-branched seaweed shape with a pair of tailor’s scissors while she rotated the large, hand-painted sheet of paper.5 

The mass of still photographs recording the evolution of individual compositions on the walls of Matisse’s studios and living rooms is the richest source of information, fully exploited by the authors of the short, well-written catalogue essays.6 Without those photographs, we might never have known, for example, that Tate’s The snail (1953; no.129) was temporarily paired with MoMA’s Memory of Oceania (1953; no.130) in a mural stretching across an entire wall of the Hôtel Régina in Nice (no.85; Fig.61). Detached and treated as independent compositions, they left space for the abstracted flowers and simplified faces of the definitive Large decoration with masks (1953; no.131) – a ten-metre-wide stunner lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The photographs also reveal how different everything looked when the layered, slightly curling papers were still attached only by pins and fluttered in the gentle breeze within the studio, and when dozens of the smaller compositions were hung so close together that they formed a vast, teeming patchwork. A wall at Tate Modern imitated one such studio installation, and thrilling coup de théâtre it was as one caught sight of it through a doorway, though one could not but regret the taming, confining effect of glue, frames and glazing. 

Matisse’s creative process in his cut-outs is admittedly well-trodden territory: visitors to his studio (Picasso included) were spellbound and recorded their impressions; successive scholars have analysed it. But it is the perfect subject for an exhibition since the works of art frankly manifest the constructive performance. The images in Jazz are familiar from the pochoir replicas published in 1947 by Tériade, but it is only when face to face with the maquettes that one fully appreciates the paradoxical blend of spontaneity and ref­lection, economy and labour, brutality and subtlety, for pochoir has an emollient effect, masking, for instance, the redeployment of off-cuts and variations in manual actions, and all but obliterating the modulations in touch and density of colour that invigorate the hand-painted papers.7 Thus in the maquette for The clown (1943; no.18; Fig.62), to create the fluttering curtain on the left that contributes to the sensation of depth, Matisse eased apart the two halves of a yellow strip he had sliced through in a wavy line. That simple but versatile device, used several times in Jazz, is far more salient in the original than in the pochoir, where there is no physical relief and the vital, separating action is concealed. In the case of Forms (1944; no.28; Fig.63), one needs to see the maquette to be sure that the blue vase-like body on the right was indeed cut from the blue rectangle on the left, and that further trimming and patching were required to achieve the all-important variation in shape and movement. This hauntingly beautiful composition anticipated by some eight years the supremely eco­nomical Venus (1952; no.115; Fig.64), whose voluptuous torso is conjured magically from the negative space between two blue cut-outs. And only when confronted by the originals is one conscious of the fierce energy of the technique: far from being glibly fluent, the contours unleash tiny dramas in their nicks and stutters; spacing is unpredictable; no cut element is ever perfectly regular or repeated exactly, no structural rule rigidly applied, even in a work such as Large decoration with masks that appears to rely on pattern and symmetry. Matisse’s cut-outs ravish through their gorgeous colour but are never easy-going; they are no good as background music.

Notorious for his anxiety and self-doubt, Matisse in his letters and interviews reveals that he delighted in his cut-outs, revelling in his sense that this rudimentary, craft technique encompassed and united in one gesture the arts of painting, drawing and sculpting. But, as he ruefully remarked to André Verdet in 1952, he knew some people thought he was merely ‘having fun cutting up paper [. . .] falling into a second childhood’.8 That accusation continued to be voiced in the years following Matisse’s death: when The snail was purchased for the Tate in 1962 there were angry and abusive letters in the press.9 Now that the cut-outs have definitively entered the canon of modern art, the low rumblings of discontent have become more high-minded, turning mainly on Matisse’s decorative aesthetic: designs for stained-glass windows, rugs, chasubles and ceramic murals are not on a par with ‘pure’ painting and sculpture; ‘great’ art deals with the tragic reality and destiny of mankind; visual pleasure and beautification through ornament are lower goals; and so on. It goes without saying that this prejudice against ‘decorative art’ is a Western phenomenon, codified in the Academies, and that Matisse, who was profoundly influenced by Islamic and Oriental art and believed in the healing, life-enhancing role of the artist, never shared it.10 Here and there, the authors of the catalogue of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs touch on the vexed questions of relative value and classification, but for the most part wisely leave the works themselves to mount a triumphant self-defence.

1 Catalogue: Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. Edited by Karl Buchberg, Nicolas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman and Nicholas Serota. 294 pp. incl. 250 col. + 64 b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2014), £29.99. ISBN 978–1–84976–130–7.

2 K. Buchberg, N. Cullinan, J. Hauptman and N. Serota: ‘The Studio as Site and Subject’, in ibid., p.14.

3 K. Buchberg, M. Gross and S. Lohrengel: ‘Materials and Techniques’, in ibid., pp.253–65.

4 Ibid., p.255, quoting Paule Caen-Martin, who was a studio assistant from February 1949 to spring 1952.

5 Tate Modern’s exhibition label followed the catalogue (ibid., p.290) in dating Adrien Maeght’s film 1945. Since Sorrows of the king (Centre Pompidou, Paris; not exhibited) is glimpsed in the background, the footage must have been shot in or after 1952.

6 The catalogue also includes an absorbing, text-free ‘photo essay’ (pp.31–83).

7 At Tate Modern the twenty maquettes for Jazz, created between 1943 and 1944, were hung immediately above the pochoir replicas.

8 Quoted by Rémi Labrusse in ‘Decoration beyond Decoration’, in O. Berggruen and M. Hollein, eds.: Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors. Masterpieces from the Late Years, New York 2002, p.77.

9 R. Alley: Catalogue of The Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art, other than works by British Artists, London 1981, p.xv.

10 For a valuable discussion of Matisse’s concept of ‘decoration’, see Labrusse, op. cit. (note 8), pp.67–85.