Matisse Retrospective

Midway through the museum’s retrospective on Matisse, I bumped into the painter Alex Katz. He looked at me, agog, and said, ”I thought I was going to faint when I saw these paintings.” He gestured at two Matisse still life works from the mid 1940s. Already in a stunned state of my own, I followed his lead and gulped at the revolutionary pictorial power and radical colour radiating off these two power houses, one dominated by a celestial red and an arrangement on a table. In the foreground, were either a dog and cat chasing each other, or a pair of animal-skin rugs. Then I looked at the painting next to it, which also showed Matisse’s inherent ability to depict form and colour, with stupendous results. I saw the same still life depicted on the same table with the same vase, goblet, and fruit. But this version was totally different. Where the dog and cat were, there’s an ultra-flat still life within the still life. It’s so categorically compressed that it looks less than two-dimensional; maybe, one-half-dimensional. I thought I, like Katz, might pass out.

At the entrance to the exhibition, you’re greeted by a timeline showing Matisse’s artistic evolution. What becomes evident as you walk through the rooms is the incredible consistency of his vision. From the earliest sketches to his final canvases, Matisse's eye for composition and balance remained remarkably stable. While other artists of his generation veered wildly in style, Matisse seemed to refine rather than reinvent. It’s this quiet, persistent exploration of visual language — not dramatic breakthroughs — that defines the power of the exhibition. Even when Matisse returns to the same subject years apart, the shift is measured, thoughtful, deliberate. He trusted his instincts and, more importantly, his discipline.

The exhibition at the museum should dispel any doubts about how hard this father of modern art laboured to create the colourful and seemingly insouciant paintings and works on paper that have become so well-known and loved. As the wall texts in the show point out, “Painting did not, and never had, come easily to Matisse. Throughout his career, he constantly hesitated, questioned, repainted and re-evaluated his work.” Today it seems clearer than ever that Matisse was, first and foremost, a supreme colourist. His use of pinks and purples, clarets, oranges and crimsons, is more surprising and electric, than any other European’s of that generation. Even when you compare him to that other 20th-century giant Picasso, Matisse wins the colour wars hands down (even Picasso admitted it, once). Far from the intuitive, child-like genius that some have imagined him to be, Matisse was someone who turned himself into a major artist through years of prodigious effort. In that respect, he’s no different from the vast majority of artists throughout history.

Ravishing colours, flowing lines, sinuous bodies: Henri Matisse made it all look effortless. But it wasn’t. Throughout his career Matisse wrestled with the fundamentals of painting; he revisited the same subjects over and over, and he often used completed canvases as models for later ones. Extraordinary insights into his process of creation are laid bare in the eye-opening new exhibition at the museum. The nearly 50 paintings on display reveal how Matisse used older works to generate new ideas. Sometimes the differences are subtle, and sometimes the works are shockingly unalike. But Matisse was using repeated images to push his art further. Later in his career, Matisse hired a photographer to capture his work in the studio. He used photographs of his own paintings to judge whether he was making progress, or whether he’d gone off track. Ultimately, the show reveals Matisse as an artist who made the act of painting into something as important, and as inspiring, as his finished works.