Lady’s Matisse Cut-Outs Exhibition Review

It’s an exciting week for London! The city is abuzz with anticipation for the four-day Easter bank holiday weekend, and seemingly everyone has big plans. But there’s something to look forward to even before school lets out: the opening of the greatly anticipated Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition at the Tate Modern on Thursday. I got a special sneak preview this morning, and here’s what I found.

The exhibition is the largest of Matisse’s cut-out works ever to be put on. It highlights the works of the artist at the end of his life.

Ailing and somewhat bedridden, Matisse abandoned painting—the genre to which he had dedicated most of his career—and devoted the remainder of his days to working with cut-out forms.

As the artist himself said, they’re examples of how he was “cutting directly into color.”

His signature use of bold colors and shapes pervades his later works, and motifs like seaweed—inspired by his time in Tahiti—appear throughout the cut-outs he created between 1937 and his death in 1954.

The exhibition itself features 14 rooms containing both Matisse’s cut-outs and other genres and media, including paintings, videos, sculpture, and stained glass.

It also displays some of his early cut-outs in a book called Jazz, which was published in Paris in 1947. As with many of the works in the exhibition, it’s the first time the book has been displayed outside of France.

In another first, the Matisse cut-outs exhibition brings together the artist’s four famous Blue Nudes in the same room for the first time in the UK.

They’ve been brought in from all over Europe, and displaying them all together offers a great insight into Matisse’s exploration of the cut-out genre and the sculptural quality of his female forms.

The works in the exhibition range from smaller canvases to huge ones that take up entire walls, with the artist’s latest works exhibiting an awe-inspiring monumentality.

For me, particular highlights of the exhibition were “The Thousand and One Nights”, a seductive cut-out representation of the famous story of Scheherazade and her king, and “The Sheaf”, a work that focuses on his seaweed motif.

Overall, I enjoyed the exhibition and appreciated the rare opportunity to see so many of Matisse’s cut-outs all in one place.

I also gained a better understanding of his later works than I ever learned from previous exhibitions and trips to the Matisse museum in Nice.

The 130 works in the Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition will be on display at the Tate Modern in London from April 17th until September 7th, so even if you’re away over the Easter holidays, there’s still plenty of time to indulge in the color and forms when you return.

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