Matisse at the Orangerie, “an exhibition on the doubt of an artist and his ability to renew himself, to reinvent himself”

The painter Henri Matisse is honored in Paris at the Musée de l’Orangerie for three months. An exhibition of his creations from the 1930s has been open since March 1.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Henri Matisse at the age of 60 was a widely recognized artist. His work is promoted by the journal Art books. However, he doubts and goes through a crisis of inspiration. It is these years marked by a long journey which led him notably to Polynesia and the United States that this exhibition “Matisse Cahiers d’Art – Le turn of the 1930s” at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris focuses on until May 29.

The exhibition brings together more than a hundred works. “It’s an exhibition that is both about an artist’s doubt and his ability to renew and reinvent himself, explains Cécile Debray, the curator of the exhibition. We follow this crisis step by step, this reflection, this time of pause thanks to the drawing and the sculpture and the flowering, almost, of paintings from 1935-1936, which form the last part of the exhibition.

One can see there preparatory studies of Dance, a key work from the 1930s. This large decor created for the Barnes Foundation in the United States enabled Matisse to reinvent his art. For his composition, he uses shapes cut out of gouache paper, an unprecedented work technique.

Works rarely exhibited in France

Until 1935, Matisse favored drawing and engraving. Then, painting regains its rights, with in particular The great reclining nude, exceptionally on loan from the Baltimore Museum. “It is a canvas that he worked on in successive stages, at lengthexplains Cécile Debray, and all these stages have been documented by photographs which show how Matisse, starting from a relatively naturalistic, relatively realistic drawing, will gradually stylize it to arrive at this representation which is this pink nude.”

“It’s a pre-pop canvas, which is extremely daring and extremely beautiful. It is without doubt one of the most reproduced of Matisse’s work.”

Cécile Debray, curator of the exhibition

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Another major piece of the exhibition: Singingpresented for the first time in France. “It’s a set that was made for the apartment of an American collector and which shows four figures: one is sleeping, the other two are listening and we have the singer on the right side”, describes the curator. This work crossed the Atlantic in 1938, and “never came back here, was never shown to the public again”.

The exhibition ends with a series of canvases around the theme of Romanian blouses worn by the models who pose for the painter. They bear witness to the renewal of Matisse’s painting.

“Woman seated in an armchair”, by Henri Matisse, one of the paintings from the series of Romanian blouses. (ANNE CHÉPEAU / FRANCEINFO)

The Matisse exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris: visit with Anne Chépeau

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