Matisse's Final Years: A Grand Palais Exhibition of Life-Enhancing Genius
Forget the joy and energy of youth – your best days might yet be ahead. Henri Matisse's were, even when he barely survived surgery in his early 70s as war engulfed France. Sitting in his wheelchair, with a wobbly hand and weakened body, he reinvented himself and reshaped modern art in the process.
An Epic Collection of Color and Form
The Grand Palais's huge exploration of the last years of Matisse's life – from his surgery in 1941 to his death in 1954 – is a dizzying, joyous celebration of color, form, line, and light. It's so good, so beautiful, and so totally overwhelming. With all the resources of France's vast collection of Matisse works, this show is full of hits.
The exhibition starts small, even claustrophobic. In his studio in Nice, Matisse paints still lifes: red tulips, lilac-fleshed oysters, lemons, and mimosa in greens, reds, and yellows. The war loomed over the Riviera. In 1944, the artist's wife and daughter, who had secretly joined the resistance, were arrested by the Gestapo. German planes buzzed overhead. If these paintings look light and airy, they're not. They are small and tight, reworked over and over.
Matisse paints the same group of models, shifting them around the room, opening slats to let in light, and moving screens to create shadows. It's obsessive, repetitive, and intentionally cinematic, as if he's creating dozens of filmic stills of the same scene.
Artistic Revolution Through Repetition and Simplification
That repetition, and a newly rediscovered love of drawing, triggered something in Henri. His Themes and Variations series sees him draw the same reclining woman, the same vase of flowers, and the same face over and over, each time refining the line, simplifying the image, and reducing everything down to its barest components. "I have attained a form filtered to its essentials," he said.
That's artistic revolution number one here. Number two involved dropping the paintbrush and pens entirely and picking up scissors. This is the late Matisse we all know – the radical compositions, jagged shapes, and eye-popping Technicolor boldness – and it starts here. In 1944, he's asked to make a book about color and goes way over the brief.
The maquettes for that book are full of swirling leaves, diving bodies, skies of ultramarine blue, funerals in purple, elephants in white, and his amazing black Icarus falling past a swirl of yellow stars. He called the book Jazz, like he was making chords out of color. It's an amazing moment in art, beautifully presented here, though the soundtrack of contemporary jazz improv might leave some wishing for silence.
Cutouts and Chapel Designs: A New Level of Art
After an air raid on Nice, Matisse moved to Vence in the hills behind the city. He covered the walls of his bedroom in cutouts, floor to ceiling. It's as if his world opened up as he explored all the possibilities of his new approach. He comes back to painting, too: lighter, airier, and simpler than before, with shapes in his interior still lifes reduced and refined. Then he strips away the color, and even in black and white, they feel luminous and shocking.
But the cutouts are on another level. So ridiculously bold and graphic, so direct and bright, and so decorative. You can almost feel the breeze when Matisse recreates the landscape of Polynesia in collages of blue and white, or smell the seaweed when he pastes together a huge vision of swaying fronds.
As the 1950s rolled around, Matisse was asked to design a chapel in Vence, and he went all in. Priests' vestments in green and yellow, stained glass covered in plant motifs that symbolize his late-life rebirth. It is religious and spiritual but not particularly godly. Staring up at the maquettes and gleaming stained glass, it's art that one communes with.
Personal Reflections and the Peak of the Show
For many, seeing the chapel works is a moving experience, having grown up nearby or studied art history. They're affecting in a way that only great art ever really can be. The famous – and very much objectifying – blue nudes come later, somehow reducing the whole history of nude painting down to four of the simplest images you'll ever see, shown alongside a final self-portrait in gouache, which is also perfect, obviously.
But this enormous show peaks, for many, with one single painting of a face: black ink on yellow paper. Count the lines: there are seven of them. The bare minimum he needed to convey a face, to paint a life. At 80 years old, sick and weak, he really had it all figured out.
The exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris runs from 24 March to 26 July, offering a profound look into Matisse's legacy and his transformative final years.
