Henri Matisse - The Cut-Outs

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Lucien Hervé, Hôtel Régina, Nice, 1949 (no. 76)

Lucien Hervé, Hôtel Régina, Nice, 1949

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AVANT la LETTRE In 1938 the photographer Roger Schall visited Matisse on the fourth floor of 1 Place Charles-Félix in Nice to take pictures of the artist and his studio for a piece in Vogue. Though shot during this visit, the photograph seen here (fig. 9) was not among those that ultimately illustrated the article when it appeared in that year’s June 15th issue; Schall’s shot of the artist silhouetted against the cages of his aviary took full-page precedence instead. Two additional, smaller photographs (fig. 10) capture artwork in situ, though seemingly more to convey the interior’s ambience than to record the artist’s process. These images serve the accompanying prose’s claim that ‘the studio is far more like a salon, with plants, beautiful old pieces of furniture, charcoal studies of works in progress, and a mannequin’s stand, left in place, with the posing dress thrown over a chair’.1 The main purpose of the piece was to publicise Matisse’s designs for an upcoming Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production, choreographed

by Léonide Massine to a symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich. The ballet would premiere in Monte Carlo on 11 May 1939 with the title Rouge et Noir, though by the time it opened in Paris on 5 June of that year, its name had been changed to L’Étrange Farandole.2 A large colour reproduction of ‘Matisse’s own sketch of monumental dancing figures for the backdrop of “La Farandole”’ leads the article (fig. 11).3 Though if the sketch’s relationship to the ballet project were not clearly stated in its caption and the date of ‘38’ not plainly inscribed, one might easily mistake it for a study relating to Matisse’s large mural decoration for Albert Barnes’s home Opposite: Fig. 9 Place Charles Félix, Nice, 1938

Samantha Friedman

Fig. 10 Two photographs by Roger Schall (‘The Studio – Paintings in Prospect on the Wall’ and ‘The Aviary – Ballet Studies on the Wall’) as laid out in Vogue, 15 June 1938, p. 30

Fig. 11 ‘Matisse’s own sketch of monumental dancing figures for the backdrop of “La Farandole”’, as laid out in Vogue, 15 June 1938, pp. 28–9

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6. Two Dancers 1937–8 Stage curtain design for the ballet Rouge et Noir Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on board 63 × 64.5 (24⅞ × 25⅜)

7. Two Dancers 1937–8 Stage curtain design for the ballet Rouge et Noir Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, notebook papers, pencil and drawing pins (thumb tacks) 80.2 × 64.5 (31⅝ × 25⅜)

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19. The Circus 1943 Maquette for plate II from the illustrated book Jazz (1947) Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on canvas 45.2 × 67.1 (17¾ × 26⅜)

20. Monsieur Loyal 1943 Maquette for plate III from the illustrated book Jazz (1947) Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on canvas 54.7 × 42.7 (21½ × 16¾)

21. The Nightmare of the White Elephant 1943 Maquette for plate IV from the illustrated book Jazz (1947) Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on canvas 43.9 × 66.7 (17¼ × 26¼)

22. Circus Scene 1943 Drawing for the illustrated book Jazz (1947) Pencil on paper, 27.9 × 38.1 (11 × 15) 23. Circus Scene 1943 Drawing for the illustrated book Jazz (1947) Pencil on paper, 28.3 × 38.4 (11⅛ × 15⅛)

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68. Black and Violet Arabesques on Orange Background 1947 Gouache on paper, cut and pasted 40 × 26.5 (15¾ × 10⅜)

69. Leaf Motif c. 1948 Maquette for scarf (realised c.1948) Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, and ink 34 × 19.5 (13⅜ × 7⅝)

70. Alga on Green Background 1947 Gouache on paper, cut and pasted 24.8 × 14.6 (9¾ × 5¾)

71. Palmette c. 1947 Gouache on paper, cut and pasted 71.1 × 53.3 (28 × 21)

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Fig. 37 Two states of Christmas Eve with Black Leaf on Green Background and Black Leaf on Red Background, Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1952

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96. Black Leaf on Green Background 1952 Gouache on paper, cut and pasted 60 × 39 (23⅝ × 15⅜)

97. Black Leaf on Red Background 1952 Gouache on paper, cut and pasted 50 × 40 (19¾ × 15¾)

98. Christmas Eve 1952 Maquette for stained-glass window (realised 1952) Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on board, 322.8 × 135.9 (127 × 53½)

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125. Reclining Nude II 1927 Bronze, 28.3 × 49.5 × 14.9 (11⅛ × 19½ × 5⅞)

126. Reclining Nude III 1929 Bronze, 18.7 × 46.5 × 15.1 (7⅜ × 18⅜ × 6)

127. Venus in a Shell I 1930 Bronze, 31.1 × 18.2 × 20.2 (12¼ × 7⅛ × 8)

128. Venus in a Shell II 1932 Bronze, 32.4 × 20.3 × 23.2 (12¾ × 8 × 9⅛)

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Henri Matisse The Cut-Outs Edited by Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman and Nicholas Serota With essays by Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Samantha Friedman, Flavia Frigeri, Markus Gross, Jodi Hauptman, Stephan Lohrengel and Nicholas Serota

Tate Publishing

The STUDIO as SITE and SUBJECT Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman and Nicholas Serota

Fig. 1 Walter Carone, Matisse working at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1952

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In a 1952 interview with the writer André Verdet Henri Matisse describes a cluster of colourful cut-paper forms pinned to his studio walls as a ‘little garden’. ‘You see,’ he explains, ‘as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk … There are leaves, fruits, a bird.’

As Matisse speaks, he points to ‘a large mural composition of cut paper that encompassed half the room’.1 Leaves in hues of green, red, blue, yellow and orange – heavy with finger-like tendrils or extended with limbs radiating outwards – and ultramarine pomegranates of varying sizes cover two adjoining walls. Arrayed across the walls and into the corner, the forms are pinned, some with multiple pins, but not too firmly or flatly, allowing each leaf or fruit to follow the force of its own materiality, weight and position: drooping, bending, relaxing, fluttering, reacting to a breath of air, making shadows. The meeting of the two walls at a ninety-degree angle creates a small plot – a space for planting – around which the artist and the interviewer can walk.

Though Matisse is referring to a specific group of cut-paper forms still then in progress – what ultimately became the work known as The Parakeet and the Mermaid (no. 118) – his description of this composition and by extension the studio in which it was made as a garden is particularly instructive in elucidating the extraordinary work of his last decade, when he turned to painted paper as his primary medium and scissors as his chief implement.

His efforts – giving coloured sheets the radiance of stained glass, infusing contour with sculptural form,

simplifying shapes into pure signs – resulted in an entirely new form called papier découpé, or cut-out.

Matisse had always treated his garden as an extension of his studio, observing differences in chromatic ‘precision’, ‘intensity’ and ‘luminosity’, studying the way ‘seeds, spindly and pale, suck strength and color from the sun day by day’ or, for comparison, setting flowers ‘right alongside’ his paintings and worrying at ‘how poor and dull all my colors seem!’2 In this period, at the end of his life, the studio took on the very features of a garden: in its organisation, at once organic and controlled; in its unceasing flux and metamorphosis; in its mix and melding of colour and texture; and in its environmental aspect, a three-dimensional space that could be physically experienced, a place where one ‘can walk’. Cut-paper flora sprouted and spread across the walls of his living and work space; the artist literally lived within the works.3 Verdet evocatively describes the scene: ‘A limpid scattering of color bathes the whole room, glowing like a rainbow, flaring like lightning, becoming soft and supple, then iridescent again like a rainbow … blue, orange, violet, almond green, leaf green, orderly, organised, each finding its own shape and place in an ensemble of forms.’4 These features – organic growth, proliferation, perpetual flux and spatial expansion – are at the heart of Matisse’s cut-out practice and reflect both a renewed commitment to investigating problems of colour and contour and an inventiveness directed at the very status of the work of art, whether as a unique object, ornament or environment.

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INVENTING Jodi a NEW Hauptman OPERATION In a letter to André Rouveyre, dated 22 February 1948, Matisse writes: ‘The walls of my bedroom are covered with cut-outs.’ ‘I do not yet know what I shall do with these new cut-outs,’ he wonders, but with confidence announces: ‘The result is of more importance than it would seem.’1 Matisse’s prediction turned out to be spot on: his cut-outs, though denigrated by some observers when they were first exhibited, have been enormously influential. Their ‘importance’, to borrow his word, can be seen in myriad ways. Their economy of means, their graphic geometries, their play with colour and contrast, their exploitation of decorative strategies all showed the artist, late in his career, continuing to advance the compositional and chromatic aspects of picture making.2 Matisse’s positive assessment, it should be noted, was made when the cut-outs were still pinned to the walls, stretched around him from floor to ceiling, around doorways and against mouldings, and undulating into space. Matisse saw as yet unidentifiable potential in their tentative, sculptural and environmental conditions – in their very making. Looking back at photographs of his work pinned to the walls of his bedroom/studio at that time (pp. 36–41; fig. 22), we are awestruck not only by the cut-outs’ sheer visual excitement, their colliding shapes and colour, their boundless – and gorgeous – contamination of surface, but even more in the revelation of a radically new form.3 Matisse’s invention of this new form – his distinctive approach to a basic set of tools and materials (especially the ways in which their particular qualities helped mould the results), the process 16

Fig. 3 Photographer unknown, Matisse at Villa le Rêve, Vence, c. 1946–7

by which the works were physically constructed in the studio, and the groundbreaking implications of his methods of cutting, pinning and composing on the wall – is our subject here.

Cutting In a blurred and scratchy black and white film, an amateur production shot in 1952, Henri Matisse is seen in his studio cutting paper.4 Using an oversized pair of shears – perhaps the kind used to cut fabric – Matisse cuts into a large sheet, so large in fact, that an assistant helps manipulate it. As Matisse cuts through the paper, the assistant turns and rotates the sheet so that the artist’s hand and the scissors can keep to its course. The cut shape comes to life at the same time as its negative appears, dancing through space while it splits away from the blade. As the sheet is turned to the path and rhythm of the cut, we glimpse its unpainted back, a hint at the potential reversals and rotations of each cut form.

The cut creates a positive and a negative, each offering equal potential to the user. In their making the negative and opposite of each shape can be perceived, launching an iterative vocabulary of forms: one geometry leads to another and still another in an ever-lengthening chain.

As low resolution as this film is, it nonetheless offers a strikingly clear window onto what Matisse called his ‘cutting out operation’ and the nature of the forms produced.5 For Matisse, cutting was not a simple technique – though it may have started 17

In the Studio A Photo Essay Matisse created his cut-outs in three different studios. In 1946 he developed Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea on the walls of an apartment at 132 Boulevard Montparnasse, Paris.

Towards the end of his time at the Villa le Rêve, in Vence, where he lived and worked between 1943 and 1948, Matisse covered its walls with vibrantly coloured cut-paper forms. From 1949 until his death in 1954 Matisse’s cut-outs grew in ambition, expanding throughout the interiors of the Hôtel Régina, Nice.

With this body of work, the studio changed from being a subject – as it had been in numerous paintings throughout Matisse’s long career – to a support; the walls of his residences became the grounds for the cut-outs.

The selection of photographs that follows offers a glimpse into the three studios in which the cut-outs were made, allowing the reader to witness the evolution of Matisse’s approach to his new medium. We see the metamorphosis of compositions and the constant migration of forms from one grouping to another, from one wall to another, from one studio to another.

The images were taken by a variety of photographers, both professional and amateur: Matisse’s secretary Lydia Delectorskaya and her cousin Hélène Adant; photographers on assignment for Vogue or Paris Match, like Clifford Coffin or Walter Carone; or scholars such as John Rewald, who interviewed Matisse for Alfred H. Barr, Jr’s 1951 volume Matisse: His Art and his Public.

The corresponding catalogue numbers for works included in the exhibition accompany each photograph, inviting the reader to compare the cut-outs’ creation in the studio to their subsequent, independent lives and finished states.

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Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1952

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