BWW Reviews: The Shapes, the Colors, the Triumph of HENRI MATISSE: THE CUT-OUTS

At times, it is easy to forget that Henri Matisse lived all the way through the 1940s and well into the 1950s. Faced with the era of totalitarianism, artists as fanciful as Picasso and Chagall waxed bleak, violent, urgent; then, faced with a new era of ever-encompassing prosperity and ever-present tensions, younger painters and sculptors brought large-scale abstraction, commercial satire, and concept art to rapid maturity. With art that could seem apolitical at best and narrowly utopian at worst, Matisse didn't necessarily grow with the times. Yet he grew. In the 1940s, he contrived the first of what would become known as the "cut-outs"--compositions made of multi-hued paper shapes, often cut by hand and painstakingly arranged and re-arranged by Matisse himself. Whether these creations were dictated by dedication to form or by delusions of repose, by obliviousness or indifference or lonely and masterful stoicism, has remained an open question ever since Matisse created his last, fancily floral cut-outs around 1953.

Leave the question open. Whatever else they signify, the cut-outs represent Matisse at both his most definitive and his most inquisitive. Put a hundred or so of them in one place, and they will give you an exhibition of elemental beauty; Matisse's shapes often recall flowers, animals, and bodies in motion--a splendid menagerie, unified by heady hues and lovingly-wrought contours. This is the experience of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, an exhibition curated--no, brought to life--by Karl Buchberg and Jodi Hauptman at the Museum of Modern Art. If Matisse was indeed aloof, his cut-outs are a world and a law unto themselves. They burst through the same boundaries of painting and collage and sculpture and installation that younger artists of the 1940s and 1950s were set on demolishing, but in Matisse's own way, with the same combination of outward innocence and consuming emotion that ran through his entire career.

It takes Buchberg and Hauptman only a few well-chosen selections to chart Matisse's path from early experiments in gouache and cut paper to the first bona fide cut-outs. The task of portioning out different elements and trying out different arrangements was essential to the 1940 Still Life with Shell: a shell, a pitcher, and green apples all serve as moveable, cut-out pieces. Yet cut paper had also provided Matisse with a medium for thinking through larger projects, including endeavors in mural design and modern dance. To plan out a stage curtain for the ballet Red and Black, Matisse anchored unruly strips of white and yellow paper--the elements of a single, leaping body--to a background of flat blues and reds. The same colors and motifs re-appear in Matisse's celebrated artist's book, Jazz, along with more fluid shapes in magenta and jungle green. Though Jazz announced the reign of the cut-outs, it did so in a manner that displeased their creator; Matisse was unhappy with the flattening and normalizing effects that reproduction forced upon his compositions. For him, the cut-outs needed the kind of sculptural depth that the Red and Black mock-up, by a seeming accident, had brought into the picture.

After Jazz had run its course, the cut-outs extended their domain to textile designs, stained glass windows, and home murals. The middle stages of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs bring in some of these projects for scrutiny, though there are also selections that are traditional and backward-glancing in comparison. Among the entries from the late 1940s is Mimosa, a rug maquette which uses the same leafy biomorphs found in more standard graphics from the same period; you need to be told that this particular one is for the floor, but then again, almost any one of Matisse's organic shapes could be used for mural design, interior design, you name it. The versatility of the cut-outs is again evident in Matisse's designs for the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence (controlled and stunning) and in his Chrismas window commission for Life Magazine (not his strongest work, but publicity is publicity). Such entries may make the next turn in the exhibit, and in Matisse's output, rather surprising--a return to clear, classicizing representation, epitomized by the Blue Nude series of 1952. He both pushes the cut-outs forward here, playing slight variations on set poses and achieving a startling range of moods, yet also pushes back against his artistic past; these Blue Nudes recall both the famous Blue Nude of 1907 and Matisse's sculpture series The Back, a similarly remarkable exercise in reduction and suggestion.

Somewhere around the Life Magazine window, I found that I had stopped trying to defend against Matisse's easier charms--against the endearing child's logic of his work and methods, a trait that both preoccupies his critics and sets them on edge. A few examples: Matisse's The Swimming Pool was brought to life because Matisse, after a disappointingly hot day at the beach, wanted a water-themed mural in his own home; then, Matisse's The Parakeet and the Mermaid was conceived and assembled because the ailing Matisse wanted to "make a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird." The video footage at MoMA doesn't do much to counter-act these mildly silly impressions: watching Matisse make a cut-out is like watching a bear wrestle with a huge piece of kelp. He couldn't have been a cold formalist if he had tried--and if he had, he would have ended with a style of lesser humanism and inferior clarity. The cut-outs are not what they are in spite of all this; they are what they are--a visionary, organic achievement rivaled by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and by little else--because of this.

In his final two years of life, Matisse created some of the most challenging of his cut-outs. Design and decoration were still part of the program, as can be seen in the regularized, absolutely massive Large Decoration with Masks. This grand creation was accompanied by works that are dissonant, melancholy, and revelatory, from the nearly abstract Memory of Oceania to the resplendent Ivy in Flower, a cut-out that almost seems to jingle and shimmer, that transports you somewhere far beyond art. Compositions of this size are gathered in the last room; nowhere else in the cut-outs did Matisse so confidently manipulate flat white backgrounds, or so effectively incorporate drawing and sketching. This is the end, yet it was almost a new arrival in Matisse's aesthetic.

Then it is over. Maybe Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs cannot really help us to live in the world outside Matisse's hues and curves and images of joy and escape. Yet it is one of the exhibitions that I was happy to be alive to see, and always will be one of them. Walk inside and look around and be filled, if only fleetingly, with joy.

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