HENRI MATISSE

DRAWING WITH SCISSORS
MASTERPIECES FROM THE LATE YEARS
20 December 2002 - 2 March 2003

The SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT presents a comprehensive survey of Henri Matisse’s late landmark works. The papiers découpés Matisse steeped himself in from the 1940s until his death in 1954 are regarded as the fulfillment of his artistic dream aimed at a synthesis of line and color. Curated by Oliver Berggruen and assembling 70 international loans from the most important public and private collections in the United States of America, Asia, South America, and Europe, the exhibition reveals the entire range of cut-outs from the early book ”Jazz” to the wall-filling works from Matisse’s late years.

The windows of "chapelle de Rosaire of Vence" at the Schirn Exhibition.

The world-famous works document the artist’s intimate relationship to natural forms, his pleasure in ornaments, and his recollections of the deeply experienced paradise of the oceanic fauna and flora. The exhibition carries the viewer off to the sensuous world of these unique compositions by the great modern master.

Today, the emotional impact of the colors and the reduced, ornamental and flat mode of expression correspond with a newly awakened interest in an emphasis on surfaces in contemporary art. In this respect, the show not only mirrors the synergetic power of Matisse’s works but also their unabated relevance.

Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn: ”This exhibition is a dream which I have cherished for a long time and which has now come true. Thanks to the generous support by lenders from all over the world, it is the first show that assembles major cut-outs from all periods on such a scale in Europe and thus offers an extensive survey of Matisse’s late work.” Oliver Berggruen, curator of the exhibition: ”Matisse has referred to his papiers découpés as the quintessence of his achievement as an artist. Though only scarcely noticed during his lifetime, they number among the most precious classical modern works.”

Perfection of composition, ornamental essence, and reduction of form and color are reflected in all the works, which, as regards size, range from small, powerful, and intensely colored sheets to large, wall-filling pieces such as ”The Parrot and the Mermaid” from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which measures 340 x 785 cm, and the sketches for the gesamtkunstwerk of the chapel in Vence.

Besides institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Vatican Museums, the Berggruen Collection (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz) , the Menil Collection Houston, or the Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art in Japan, numerous private collectors have made their fragile works of paper available for the duration of the exhibition - items many of which have not been accessible to the public for a long time.

Considering the impressive cost, such presentations can only be realized in cooperation with sponsors. Prof. Dr. Harald Wiedmann, Spokesman of the KPMG Board of Managing Directors: ”Apart from state subsidies, cultural ventures increasingly depend on corporate partners. We, as a main sponsor, are happy to help that as many people as possible can enjoy the power and beauty of these works by Matisse.” Hartmuth A. Jung, Spokesman of the UBS Warburg AG Frankfurt Board of Directors:
”Matisse has unwaveringly persisted in developing his ideas as an artist even under personally difficult circumstances. Today, his works are landmarks of classical modern art. We are glad to support this exhibition as a main sponsor as it conveys a thorough idea of Matisse’s late œuvre.”

 

The famous work group of papiers découpés marks the end of an artistic development of enormous scope and of a long creative life. Born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in Northern France in 1869, Henri Matisse started out as a law student and worked at a law office. While recovering from a severe illness, he discovered his love of painting at the age of 21.

In 1892, two years later, he gave up his career as a lawyer and attended Gustave Moreau’s class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and William Turner, Camille Pissaro, Maurice Vlaminck, and André Derain, Matisse finally found a style of his own in 1905 - an approach characterized by bold, strong colors applied with quick strokes to the canvas .

As one of the main representatives of the ”Fauves,” the ”Wild Beasts” of Paris, Matisse was both celebrated and attacked as a representative of the avant-garde. When the revolutionary tenor of avant-garde movements had almost become the rule twenty years later, Matisse was frequently regarded as a traditional painter in both an affirmative and a negative sense.

Matisse himself emphasized the continuity in the development of his work. In regard to motifs and especially to colors, he considered the achievements of his Fauvist phase as the basis for the characteristic palette of clear, vivid, and generally almost pure colors of his papiers découpés from the early 1940s on.

”There is no gap between my earlier pictures and my cut-outs. I have only reached a form reduced to the essential through greater absoluteness and greater abstraction,” the artist wrote two years before his death in 1952 when he remembered his first experiments with the new technique.

Originally, Matisse had used cut-outs as an expedient helping him to structure surfaces. During a difficult period of his life in World War II, when his wife and daughter had been arrested as members of the Résistance and he was seriously ill and confined to his bed, Matisse had his assistants paint large webs of paper with the most vivid gouache colors, freely cut out parts with a pair of scissors, and arranged these cut-outs to form patterns and compositions.

These were then glued onto a paper background and sometimes mounted on canvas at a later point. With this step, Matisse not only changed his technique but his entire way of developing his works of art: spontaneity, planning, and composition - which had already been crucial for his painting - had to be handled in a different form and order and achieved with the help of assistants.

On many historical photographs presented in the exhibition and comprised in the catalogue that show Matisse in the last years of his life, we see the artist sitting in a chair or even in a wheelchair in his studio, working with concentration amidst pieces of cut-out paper some of which cover the walls like ”environments.”

The exhibition opens with Matisse’s first independent cut-out from 1936, the title page of the magazine ”Cahiers d’Art,” and the book ”Jazz” from 1943-4, which, published by Tériade in 1947 only, is fundamental for an understanding of the artist’s papiers découpés. In the following years, Matisse developed major series of floral and biomorphic compositions in which the ”algae” motif - which is sometimes replaced with an acanthus - stands for growth, evolution, and metamorphosis.

Here, nature figures as a symbol and metaphor, as it does in the two series ”Oceania, the Sky” and ”Oceania, the Sea,” for example, in which Matisse, in 1946, drew on his deep memories of an early visit to Tahiti. Parts symbolizing elements of the South Sea flora and fauna - we recognize birds, corals, and fish - were fastened directly on the wall of his studio as if on wallpaper, and the two compositions were later reproduced in a limited series of silk-screen prints on canvas.

Many cut-outs were to serve as designs for other media such as glass windows, ceramics, fabrics, book covers, or posters, yet only a few were also realized. Matisse’s lifelong profound interest in the art of the Orient, in which a wall ceramic may have the same artistic value as a painting, and his positive attitude towards the decorative, which was rooted in the French tradition, are two crucial prerequisites when it comes to understanding his cut-outs.

Two glass window designs (see picture above )with a height of more than five meters that are to be seen in the exhibition convey an idea of the plans for the famous Chapelle de Rosaire in Vence which Matisse developed from 1949 to 1951. Instead of only focusing on the windows as originally intended, he transformed the entire interior into a gesamtkunstwerk. ”As regards the chapel, I was mainly interested in creating a balance between an area of light and color on the one hand and a simple white wall with black drawings on the other … For me, this chapel is the fulfillment of an entire busy life.”

 

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