When you consider that Henri Matisse nearly died following emergency surgery in 1941 and was in poor health until his death in 1954, it makes the productivity of his final decades all the more astonishing.
The most famous body of work of the 1940s and 1950s is the paper cut-outs—“form filtered to its essentials”, as Matisse described them. The Fondation Beyeler owns a group of the papiers-découpés, no doubt helping them to gather the stellar loans among 70 works in Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. The cut-outs are, inevitably, the exhibition’s magnificent climax.
But just as remarkable are Matisse’s final canvases, made between 1946 and 1948 in what Lydia Delectorskaya, his partner and assistant in his later years, called “a veritable explosion” of painting that took place at his villa in Vence, above the Côte d’Azur.
The Beyeler’s room of Vence interiors and related figure paintings is profoundly moving and exhilarating. These paintings are pivotal to the exhibition’s narrative. Because, while this survey reflects Matisse’s activity from the 1890s to the 1950s, its theme is travel—critical trips to the south of France, Italy, Algeria and Morocco, Polynesia and the US. But just as crucial are Matisse’s journeys into the imagination. While making the Vence paintings, Matisse felt the “curiosity that comes from a new country.” They are a final, glorious adventure at what he described as “the forefront of the expression of colour”.
Like the cut-outs, they are a distillation of Matisse’s struggle to find reductive form and colour harmonies that conveyed his resonant feelings. His long engagement with chromatic relationships meant that in them, he is able to use almost any hue, in any combination, anywhere in finding harmonic and spatial balance.
He said Tahiti entered his dreams, stating ‘that is the value of travel: it enlarges the space around us’
In Interior with an Egyptian Curtain (1948), he uses black in four separate sections—in the patterns on the textile itself at the right, in describing the darkened interior architecture against the Provençal light pouring through the window, as the shadow beneath a bowl of pomegranates on a pink table, and as some of the fronds of the palm tree beyond. The painting should, surely, collapse. Yet Matisse makes it a believable space while transmitting the luminous intensity of his experience.
Potpourri of colour
Such virtuosity was hard-won; Matisse described the “severe preparation” needed “to be worthy” of using colour. The show begins with La Desserte (1896-97) where you feel his battle for that worthiness. Courageous accents abound—a decanter stopper catches the light with a potpourri of crimson, orange, pink and viridian—but the overall effect is muted. Captivated by Paul Cézanne, Matisse was yet to absorb the older artist’s light touch.
Quickly, we are led to Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904), Matisse’s response to a summer in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac, the painter whose Divisionist theories the painting embodies. The work’s title is taken from a line in Charles Baudelaire’s poem Invitation to the Voyage, the overall title of the show. It is a strange picture: Matisse’s first masterpiece, yet anomalous. He quickly moved away from Signac in 1905, liberating himself from Divisionist strictures in Collioure, on France’s south-west coast. The cluster of Collioure paintings here reflect Matisse’s ecstatic unleashing of pure colour. They include The Open Window, Collioure (1905), shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that October, where the term “fauves” was first used to describe Matisse and his peers.
His pace of change is remarkable in this period: within two years came Bathers with a Turtle (1907-08), where the patches of intense hues and staccato marks of The Open Window give way to fields of serene colour behind tough, awkward sculptural figures.
A rare disappointment is the lack of more works from Matisse’s transformative trips to Morocco in 1912 and 1913—alas, many are in Moscow. While Acanthus (Moroccan Landscape) (1912) is marvellous—evoking the “mellow” light he noted in north Africa, all dusky blues and pinks, and lush, humid greens—there is an unavoidable sense of a gap here.
More Morocco pictures would have afforded a comparison with the later section dedicated to Matisse’s increasingly Orientalist preoccupations in Nice in the late 1910s and 1920s, the problematics of which are explored powerfully by the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock in a catalogue essay. The Nice works are shown alongside the four bronze backs—female figures from behind—that Matisse fashioned between 1909 and 1930, with gradually increasing abstraction. This juxtaposition reinforces the almost sculptural solidity he imbued in some of his Nice “odalisques”, particularly the Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground (1925-26). The persuasive argument is for more radicalism and Modernism in the Nice pictures than Matisse is often credited with, even if that is allied to the dispassionate, colonial gaze that Pollock identifies but is not explored in the show itself.
That gaze is an inevitable context for the one trip that Matisse himself identified as his “great voyage”—to Tahiti. Given that Paul Gauguin was an early influence, and that Matisse had spent the previous decade painting odalisques, one can easily imagine him grappling with Gauguin a generation on. However, Matisse made drawings but no paintings there. The principal effects of the Tahiti stay, and perhaps more importantly his visits to the US before and after it, are the bold paintings of Delectorskaya, his new assistant and model in the 1930s. Here, a renewed boldness and simplicity of form and purity of colour emerges, exemplified by the great Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) (1935).
Severely disabled in the 1940s and 1950s—as he made those final paintings and the cut-outs—Matisse travelled only into that “new country” of colour and to memories of previous journeys. For a tapestry commission in 1946, he finally gave full flight to his Tahiti impressions in Océanie, le ciel and Océanie, la mer—early examples of cut-outs on his studio walls that were later rendered as screenprints.
Meanwhile, in a beautiful rhyme across the temporal sweep of the exhibition, he returns to Morocco in his vast Acanthuses (1953), one of the sparsest yet most luminous of the papiers-découpés, with his now familiar reductive floral motifs in greens, yellow, red, blue and orange.
Invitation to the Voyage makes a compelling case for the transformative effect of Matisse’s many journeys. But the “reveries” that he described when discussing the Océanie works were just as crucial. After his visit to Tahiti, he said it entered his dreams, stating “that is the value of travel: it enlarges the space around us”. For him, it was not simply a geographical space, but one in which he hoped he could push his art into new territories and to greater heights. So often, he achieved just that.
What the other critics said
In Beaux Arts, Inès Boittiaux, writes that the “visitor embarks on a sumptuous journey to the heart of the master’s work”. Her “only regret” is the lack of works from Matisse’s journey to Corsica in 1898—but this is made up for by “the number of masterpieces brought together”. Jackie Wullschläger, in the Financial Times, writes that the show is “the first in decades to consider [Matisse’s] work as a whole”, showing that he “is both a linear artist, evolving from Impressionist antecedents to the brink of abstraction, and a cyclical one, endlessly retracing his steps”. Despite representing only a fraction of his output, Wullschläger writes that, “it’s hard to conceive of a richer or more joyous retrospective”.
- Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, until 26 January 2025
- The Art Newspaper's rating: the work ★★★★★; the show ★★★★; overall ★★★★½
- Curator: Raphaël Bouvier
- Tickets: 30SFr (£27, concessions available)