I visited the fantastic Matisse Cut outs exhibition at the Tate Modern in the half term. There were some 120 coloured paper cut-outs made between 1943 and 1954 mark the significant final phase in the celebrated French artist's career and I think this quote from the Guardian sums it up:
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs review – 'the lesson of a lifetime'
Nothing can prepare you for the joyous brilliance – and scale –of Matisse's late, great work, 'proliferating from one gallery to the next like some super-abundant garden' in Tate Modern's beautifully orchestrated show. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/20/henri-matisse-the-cut-outs-tate-modern-review-laura-cumming
Tate Modern's dazzling new exhibition, brings together Matisse's late-period abstract collages. It is a visual feast of colour, scale and energy. Also awe-inspiring that Matisse did these whilst being less able through illness. Matisse was in a wheelchair by 1941, following radical colon surgery at the age of 71. He could no longer work with an easel, and yet became so creatively resurgent with the cut-outs that what he gratefully called his "second life" could just as well apply to his work. Paper and scissors gave him colour and form, and a way of drawing, painting and more, that would evolve through the last 13 years of his life.
Henri Matisse is a giant of modern art. This landmark show explores the final chapter in his career in which he began ‘carving into colour’ and his series of spectacular cut-outs was born. The exhibition is an amazing once-in-a-lifetime chance to see so many of the artist’s works in one place and discover Matisse’s final artistic triumph
Technique of the Cut Outs
With the aid of his assistants, Matisse invented a systematic approach to the technique of his cut outs.. First, his studio assistants brushed Linel gouaches on sheets of white paper.
Once dry a stockpile of colored paper were available to Matisse at any given time. He often quite spontaneously cut out elements and placed them into compositions. As the play between consciously sought-for and the fortuitously-arrived at effects worked into their balances the projects moved toward completion. In the meantime many of them were posted about the studio walls.
The Linel gouaches were employed because they "directly corresponded to commercial printers ink colors" (Cowart 17) and would reproduce perfectly. The cut-outs pulsate with energy. The bright, vibrant Linel colors, deep and Light Japanese Green, vert Emeraude (Imitation veridian), Deep Cadmium Yellow, Deep Cadmium Red, Deep Persian Red, Persian Violet, and Yellow Ochre (Cowart 274), keep leaping in front of our eyes.
http://www.henri-matisse.net/cut_outs.html
can get a sense of scale with Joe (aged 7) standing in front of one of the pieces.
The Snail, 1953
Footage of Henri Matisse making a paper cut out - You tube
Five to see: key Matisse cut-outs
The Fall of Icarus, 1943Tumbling to Earth from his fantasy of flight, Icarus flails in the ethereal blue, a starburst of a broken heart scissored in scarlet and pinned to his chest.
Oceania, 1946 Matisse made several of these hieroglyphic panels in his Paris flat: flora, fauna and fish happily coexisting in the freedom of his floating worlds.
Zulma, 1950 The voluptuous female form reduced to its essentials in curving blocks of radiant hues perfectly embodies Matisse's ambition to liberate colour, to make it serve as both form and content.
Zulma, 1950
Blue Nudes, 1952 Late, great quartet of figures in which Matisse conjures sculptural form by cutting directly into, as well as around, his large paper pieces.
The Snail, 1953 The Tate's own treasured mollusc, its proverbial slowness more apparent at first than the snail itself, and brilliantly determined by the shape, size and tilting arrangements of the coloured paper squares. LC
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