‘Every minute was a minute to create’: Paris show presents Henri Matisse’s dazzling finale

“Le ressuscité”, the man who came back from the dead, is what the nuns who looked after Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in the Clinique du Parc in Lyon called him as he repeatedly cheated death following an emergency operation on a stomach tumour in the early months of 1941. This is how close we came to being denied one of the greatest of all artists’ late periods.

Matisse asked the doctors for three years; he got 13. And the work that he produced is the subject of a 300-work exhibition organised by the Centre Pompidou at the Grand Palais in Paris. In the last rooms will be a presentation of the collages in cut paper that were the final flourish of Matisse’s seven-decade career. This looks to be as comprehensive (and likely to be as beautiful) as the 2014-15 show of these works at Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

But examples of every element of Matisse’s extraordinary production during his final years abound: the maquettes and pochoir prints for Jazz (1943-47), the project that kick-started the cut-outs in earnest; the improvisatory drawings from his Themes and Variations sequence (1941-43); his last paintings, the great interiors and figure paintings made in Vence between 1946 and 1948 together with the extraordinary brush and ink works that accompanied them; and the drawings and window designs he made for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, the project completed in 1951 that Matisse himself felt was his greatest achievement.

But why do the show now? “In Paris, the last period is not well known,” says Claudine Grammont, the curator of the exhibition. She points out that the Tate and MoMA show did not come to the French capital. “And it’s important for us because this part of Matisse’s career is closely related with the history of the museum and the national collection here in France. This is [mostly] the 1940s and just after the war, it’s just the time when [the French state] really began to buy works. And it’s at the time when Matisse was really considered as a symbol of liberty and the return to liberty at the end of the war.” As well as staging a corrective to Paris missing out on The Cut-Outs show, Grammont and her team have also “tried to be more exhaustive”, she says.

Grammont explains that she is fascinated by the notion of artists’ late periods, a subject explored in depth in the exhibition’s catalogue by Antoine Compagnon. And it is especially significant in Matisse’s career, she says. “It’s really remarkable—the fact that he nearly died and that every minute was a minute to create. It was a kind of emergency.”

It is important, Grammont says, to reflect the fact that, especially because he was disabled and often ill after the operation, the transcendence Matisse found in the work was born of much anxiety and difficulty. But because of the abundant colour and apparent simplicity of Matisse’s art, the perception of ease is hard to shake—and not helped by Matisse’s famous comment about creating art that offered the “calming influence” of “a good armchair”.

“I don’t know if it’s the same in England—I know it’s not the case in America—but here in France, Matisse is really [seen as] the master of the odalisque,” Grammont says, referring particularly to the paintings made in Nice in the 1920s. “It seems easy. And in fact, it’s the contrary. This easiness is a struggle.” Indeed, in her catalogue essay, Grammont refers to Matisse’s statement in which he compares himself to a pianist practising scales or an acrobat doing exercises: “I enjoy difficulty,” he concluded.

One clear aim of Grammont’s is to attempt to evoke the fecund atmosphere of Matisse’s studio in Nice as he made the cut-outs. “The studio is the work, the work is the studio,” she says. “It’s completely symbiotic.” Matisse created an ephemeral world of coloured shapes that formed compositions that were uncontained, overlapping and creeping from the walls onto the floor—a genuinely immersive space. When creating the more than 7m-wide piece The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952), he referred to having created a garden for himself to stroll in, as he was “very often obliged to stay in bed because of my state of health”. And while Grammont acknowledges that these prized objects from global public and private collections will have to be shown with frames, unlike in the studio, she still hopes to immerse us in the fertile world of light and colour that Matisse created.

• Matisse 1941-1954, Grand Palais, Paris, 24 March-26 July

• Claudine Grammont (ed), Colour Unbound: Matisse 1941-54, Thames and Hudson, 480pp, £50 (hb), published 26 March

More Matisse: other exhibitions opening in the coming months

A host of other Matisse exhibitions are also opening in the coming months. The Baltimore Museum of Art alone has three in March: Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again (11 March-6 September), uniting Matisse with the contemporary US painter Louis Fratino; Matisse and Martinique: Portraits and Poetry (18 March-25 October) in which Denise Murrell, whose scholarship has transformed studies of Matisse’s relationship with, and depiction of, models of colour, looks at 20 works primarily drawn the artist’s illustrations for John Antoine Nau’s book Antillean Poetry; and Matisse in Vence: The Stations of the Cross (29 March-28 June), the revelatory show of drawings for the Vence chapel, first staged at the Musée Matisse in Nice last year.

In New York, Acquavella Galleries has a show of 50 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture on loan from museums, foundations and private collections. Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony (9 April-22 May), begins with sculptures made in the early 1900s and continues with major works from the following decades up to the 1940s.

The Art Institute of Chicago has a show dedicated to the Jazz prints (Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Colour, 7 March-1 June) and in May the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stages Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau: A Modern Scandal, focused on the painting that kicked of the Fauvist furore in 1905 (16 May-7 September).

In Europe, meanwhile, the Centre Pompidou’s touring exhibition of Matisse works from its collection, shown alongside artists who have carried his torch since his death, Chez Matisse: The Legacy of a New Painting, stops at the CaixaForum in Barcelona (27 March-16 August).