h.nazan ışık—

5 February 2015—

If you haven’t seen the Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) yet, hurry up. This is the Final Weekend and the Museum will keep Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs open continuously from 10:30 a.m. on Friday, February 6, through 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 8.

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In the late 1940s, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) worked with painted sheets, cut them into various shapes, then arranged into compositions and introduced a radically new form of art that came to be called a cut-out. Initially, these compositions were of modest size but, over time, their scale grew into mural-or room-size works. Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs offers a reconsideration of this body of work by exploring the artist’s methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice.

It is a big exhibition which brings the final chapter of the artist’s career with approximately 100 cut-outs—drawn from public and private collections around the globe—along with a selection of related drawings, illustrated books, stained glass, and textiles, as well as the post-conservation debut of MoMA’s The Swimming Pool (1952).

In the summer of 1952, Matisse after a visit to see divers at a pool in Cannes, declared, “I will make myself my own pool,” and began work on The Swimming Pool cut-out. A band of white paper was positioned on the walls of his dining room at the Hôtel Régina just above the level of the artist’s head, breaking only at the windows and door at opposite ends of the room. Matisse filled his “pool” with blue swimmers, divers, and sea creatures.

According to the Museum, The Swimming Pool, “restored to its original color balance, height, and architecture after an extensive five-year conservation effort, can now be experienced more closely to the way Matisse himself lived with it.” They are right: The Swimming Room is a room size cut-out, and visitors can see divers and swimmers who plunge into the pool. Not only this but also to see how the work was restored is very interesting too.

That same summer, he installed myriad leaves and pomegranates across a corner of his studio at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, creating a feeling of being in a garden.

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs is organized by The Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Tate Modern, London. It is organized at MoMA by Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator, Department of Conservation, and Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints.

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