Collection: Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: the painter of joie de vivre

From his earliest works, Matisse pushed color tones to extremes: he wanted to paint with “the bluest blue and the reddest red possible” to express that indestructible joie de vivre, a constant characteristic of all his production. He stumbled upon the experimentation of lithographs of gouache-cut papers almost by chance, yet in line with his long process of simplifying figures: recovering from an illness, unable to paint, he began cutting colored and gouache-treated paper with scissors into silhouettes that he then assembled by gluing them together, focusing solely on the balance of forms and chromatic harmony.
In 1947, he created the famous series Jazz, which he defined as “rhythmic improvisation.”
From 1950 to 1951, he produced sketches for the Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence. He called this work the masterpiece of his existence: unlike his earlier works where color was loud and provocative, here the colors were sung, harmonious, pure.
Now in his eighties, with the series of Dernières Œuvres, he left us his spiritual testament: from this period are his famous Blue Nudes, extraordinary rhythmic profiles, essential. These works are a true hymn to life, an explosion of colors, shapes, and lines of extreme purity, the final masterpiece of an eclectic and tireless artist.

When Matisse danced with scissors: the Blue Nudes

In the last years of his life, the painter of the fauves could no longer stand in front of the easel, hindered by the illness that confined him to a wheelchair, but the desire to create had not abandoned him. In fact, it may have become even more urgent. At that moment, he began painting sheets of paper with vibrant colors to then cut them with scissors and assemble them, “drawing in color” – as he loved to say – thus freeing himself from the constraints of traditional painting to create essential and free forms.
The works in this selection are color lithographs that convey all the strength of the original gouache-cut papers: the unforgettable cobalt blue fills the female silhouettes in their essential form (both pure and sensual) and traces the very movement of the bodies and their vitality.
The Blue Nudes are the expression of that joie de vivre, characteristic of Matisse, that fills the white space, the lightness that seems to defy the weight of his years and his fatigue. They communicate a rare energy, that of an artist who continued to reinvent himself until the last cut.