Matisse cut-outs at MoMA: a beguiling tribute to a grand finale

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/09/-sp-matisse-cut-outs-moma-review

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The French Riviera, the summer of 1952, the sun beating down. Henri Matisse, aged 82 and in ill health, heads to a pool at Cannes with his studio assistant, but the heat is too much for him. “I will make my own pool,” he tells her – and back in Nice he takes a pair of scissors to bright, aquatic blue paper. He shears the sheets with swooping, balletic curves. One by one they’re pinned to the walls of the dining room: swimmers crawling and surfacing, a diver plunging into the water, a pair of starfish on the sides, and abstracted but jubilant waves.

Matisse’s Swimming Pool has belonged to the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1975, but conservation concerns have kept it in out of sight for 20 years. After a painstaking restoration it is finally back on view – ringing four walls, sweeping and elemental as a cave painting – as the anchor work of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which opens to the public this weekend.

When this show premiered at Tate Modern in London last spring, my clear-sighted colleague Adrian Searle praised it as “a joyous and fascinating exhibition … I eat it with my eyes and never feel sated.” It clocked in as the best attended exhibition ever since that museum opened in 2000, drawing more than half a million viewers. It is just as joyous in this version, although in New York it has an implicit handicap: unlike at the Tate, here you can go down one escalator to MoMA’s permanent collection and see the Dance, the Red Studio, the Piano Lesson and many less merry but more powerful masterpieces that the artist made decades before. (The Tate has 20 works by Matisse, none of them major; MoMA owns 284.)

It also comes in the wake of two bolder and more analytical exhibitions in New York recently. Matisse: Radical Invention, here at MoMA in 2010, took a deep forensic dive into his stern and beleaguered paintings from World War I. Matisse: In Search of True Painting, a knockout of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, presented Matisse as a searching, agitated repeater of subjects and models, endlessly reworking his earlier efforts.

This show does not hit those heights, and that’s just fine. You can’t be a fauve – a wild beast – your whole life. Matisse’s late style is its own achievement, more Tempest than Hamlet, and the curators put up a good fight for the late work, especially the Swimming Pool, as a grand finale to his career and not just a fade-out.

For one thing, they do away with the made-for-TV stereotype that Matisse turned to cut-outs only when illness struck, like some kind of fancy Riviera art therapy. In fact he was experimenting with cut paper as early as 1931, when he used decoupage to model his decorative and design projects. (Matisse shuttled between fine and decorative arts throughout his career – a promiscuity that feels natural to us, but would be anathema to the big boys of 1950s abstract expressionism gumming up MoMA’s fourth floor.) Asked to design a curtain for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Matisse sliced up notebook papers to create a white dancer jumping through a blue sky, trailed by a comet of yellow. The thumbtacks are still in the board, showing how Matisse built up the tableau piece by piece.

In the 1930s, Matisse’s cut-outs were still just a compositional tactic in the studio, not an end in themselves. He went out of his way to keep it quiet. “I have now ‘worked’ with some blue paper for the background,” he wrote to his son and dealer Pierre about a mural he was working on – adding, in parentheses, “but it is necessary not to say anything about this.” He’d hit on something big, though, and he knew it. When his publisher friends would ask them to design their journals and books, Matisse slowly and strategically introduced cut paper techniques for both the images and the type design. By the war years, and with the publication of his illustrated book Jazz, he had stopped concealing the cut-out genesis from his final works. The showstopper is his Fall of Icarus, from 1943: a white figure with a flame-red heart flailing in a sea of black, surrounded by bursting stars. If you’ve only seen the final printed version, the cut-paper original comes as a shock. The painstakingly cut stars bulge and bristle, while the heart is pinned to Icarus’s body like an exploding shell.

The early emphasis on process is a critical move on the part of curators Karl Buchberg and Jodi Hauptman, who have organized the show at MoMA. (This is a somewhat different exhibition from the Tate’s – the Swimming Pool did not travel to London – though the two share an impressive catalogue.) Placing the cut-outs within Matisse’s larger practice of drawing and painting does him a major service; the late work can too often feel like a standalone effort, when it fact it had very deep roots. In the late 1940s, he began creating his total work of art: the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, for which he designed everything from the crucifix to the priest’s chasuble – a fire-red garment with jazzy, imperfectly symmetrical crosses – and the stained-glass windows, which he mocked up with cut paper on canvas. Pablo Picasso, when he visited his friend and rival on the Côte d’Azur, was unimpressed: “Why don’t you do a covered market instead? You could paint fruit, vegetables.” But Matisse had already spoken of the colors in Jazz as stained-glass colors, and the windows continue a career-long engagement with light, color and the intermingling of inside and outside.

Matisse referred to his use of scissors as “drawing in space”, but cutting is not the only operation that went into his cut-outs. First came color. His assistants would paint reams of paper in intense pigments Matisse had chosen, then lay the sheets out on the floor for him to select. (There’s a rainbow of paper samples in one case here, the world’s most vibrant swatch selection.) The cutting was done with big old tailor shears, carving away at the painted paper in grand arabesques, and only occasionally with finer scissors. Next came pinning, a key part of the process – you can see numerous thumbtack holes studding the papers, as Matisse experimented with placement and composition. Sometimes papers would be inverted or spun around. He lived with them, and they were always in flux; many were not glued down before the artist’s death.

They could be huge, as in the wall-scaled environments affixed with forms of leaves and pomegranates, or else scaled more modestly, like the four absurdly effortless Blue Nudes, all hanging together for the first time in decades. (Never trust an art critic who uses the word “breathtaking”, but no joke, I actually did gasp for air when I saw these.) Either way they beguile. Even the simpler and less impressive cut-outs – and there are a few – thrum with the confidence of an artist who knew, by the end of his life, that he’d cracked art wide open.

In On Late Style, his own last work, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said traced the common threads of the final output of many great artists and writers: confident and masterful, sure, but also frequently unresolved, provisional, existing more in outline than complete. “Death does sometimes wait for us,” Said wrote, “and it is possible to become aware of its waiting. The quality of time alters then, like a change in the light.” The light changed for Matisse too, in the end, but it did not dim. It blazed and blazed, bright as the Mediterranean sun.