views, reviews and previews
art HENRI MATISSE The Cut-Outs
Tate Modern 17 April–7 September Admission £18, concessions available
Tis is the best show of Matisse’s cut- outs we are ever likely to see. It covers his use of cut-outs first to plan paintings and as the originals for printed books. Ten, aſter the Second World War and as Matisse’s health declined, cut-outs became the basis of the designs for the Rosary Chapel at Vence and took on an independent life as wall decorations. Tough the designs are oſten very simple the choice of colour from Matisse’s gouache palete and the precise placing of the cut-outs required the highest skill. Tey are not the children’s collage any of us could knock up. Great claims have been made for these
works but the show is worthwhile even if those claims need to be toned down. Te excellent book which accompanies the show suggests technical reasons why this is. In the first place it is very difficult to get a handle on what Matisse actually created. He largely stopped making designs for books aſter ‘Jazz’ because even the best prints could not do justice to his originals. Te exhibition has brought together those originals with the printed copies and the originals are beter; the printed versions do not have the same verve or sharpness of colour. So at a purely technical level of producing good quality prints unlike Picasso, Matisse’s colleague and a great printmaker, Matisse’s printed works do not quite succeed even if the originals have a wonderful sense of cheap theatre and strong Fauvist colour. Te second problem is an inevitable
result of the form. Paper cut-outs are not resilient. At the Villa La Rêve in Vence,
20 ■ newdirections ■ June 2014
Matisse carefully covered a wall with cut-outs. One wall at Tate Britain repeats this, but it cannot reproduce the effect Matisse achieved. Te cut-outs are now framed and mounted. Tey had to be so they could be preserved and sold. But part of the charm of these works is that they could fluter slightly and they had no borders. To move those cut-outs was in a sense to destroy them, something which Matisse was very much aware of. So, though it is a curatorial triumph to have united these leaves and algae and doves and dancers, they no longer quite make sense.
ripe and organic but the garden has come into the studio. Tis is something real and finer than the Vence Chapel which Matisse considered to be the culmination of his work. Te Chapel is a curate’s œuf. In the first
place the collages are preparatory draſts or maquetes for the stained glass so they are not directly part of the chapel. Some of the designs – such as the vibrant, abstract bees – were rejected by Matisse as the project developed and they only live as cut-outs. A number of the cut- outs which provided the final templates are in the show, though not the glass itself, and they have that created light which Matisse associated with his own god-like role as a maker of art. Another
and deeper theme
throughout Matisse’s whole work is the female body. Tere are two large cut- outs which revel in the body, Zulma and Creole Dancer. Te later takes a very old- fashioned view of a black dancer. Te former, a large picture, harks back to Matisse’s monumental bronze female figures and is both technically and artistically one of the stars of the show. Tere are real bronze figures, small
ones, alongside the four Blue Nudes, and these are the best of his cut-outs. Tey are
over-familiar A similar problem applies even to
great wall high sequences such as Te Parakeet and the Mermaid. Tese were designed for quite secific setings and grew organically all over the walls of Matisse’s studio. Since Matisse’s work is so spatially precise, it follows that out of the studio their full impact is lost. But, these serious caveats aside, it is
still possible to be caught up in the way Matisse brought his beloved gardens into the home when he was too frail to go outside himself. It is quite difficult to carry in the mind quite what these murals look like. But they are not just very arty wallpaper. Tey do have a sense of Mediterranean light and plant life. Tey don’t run wild. Tey are not
from cheap
reproductions, but they need to be looked at carefully. We can see that Matisse took time and perhaps the odd mistake to get them right. At first they were four-square but they became twisted, the legs curled under one another so that though there is a solid base to the nudes they are fluid too. Tese pictures are also physically fragile which takes away the slight heaviness and flatness of reproductions. Tey are not as great as Matisse’s early works – the Hermitage’s Dancers or the Red Room – but if the crowds permit, give them a good, long look.
Owen Higgs
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