Forget the joy and energy of youth – your best days might yet be ahead. Henri Matisse’s were, even when he barely made it out of surgery alive in his early 70s as war was breaking out across France. Sitting in his wheelchair, his hand wobblier and weaker than ever, his body scarcely able to muster the strength to stand and paint, he reinvented himself and reshaped modern art in the process.
The Grand Palais’s huge exploration of the last years of Matisse’s life – from his surgery in 1941 to his death in 1954 – is a dizzying, joyous celebration of colour, form, line, light and then a whole bunch more colour. It’s so good, so beautiful, so totally overwhelming. It was always bound to be – it’s Matisse, with all the resources of France’s vast collection of Matisse works. It’s a show full of hits.
The exhibition starts small, even claustrophobic. In his studio in Nice, Matisse paints still lifes. Red tulips and lilac-fleshed oysters, lemons and mimosa, greens and reds and yellows. The war was looming over the Riviera. In 1944, the artist’s wife and daughter, who had secretly joined the resistance, were arrested by the Gestapo. German planes were buzzing overhead. If these paintings look light and airy, they’re not. They are small and tight, reworked over and over. Matisse paints the same group of models, shifting them around the room, opening slats to let in light, moving screens to create shadows. It’s obsessive, repetitive and intentionally cinematic, as if he’s creating dozens of filmic stills of the same scene.
But that repetition, and a newly rediscovered love of drawing, triggered something in Henri. His Themes and Variations series sees him draw the same reclining woman, the same vase of flowers, the same face, over and over, each time refining the line, simplifying the image, reducing everything down to its barest components. “I have attained a form filtered to its essentials,” he said.
That’s artistic revolution number one here. Number two involved dropping the paintbrush and pens entirely and picking up scissors. This is the late Matisse we all know – the radical compositions, jagged shapes and eye-popping Technicolor boldness – and it starts here. In 1944, he’s asked to make a book about colour, and goes way over brief. The maquettes for that book are full of swirling leaves, diving bodies, skies of ultramarine blue, funerals in purple, elephants in white, his amazing black Icarus falling past a swirl of yellow stars. He called the book Jazz, like he was making chords out of colour. It’s an amazing moment in art, beautifully presented here, though the soundtrack of contemporary jazz improv made me wish I didn’t have ears.
After an air raid on Nice, Matisse moved to Vence in the hills behind the city. He covered the walls of his bedroom in cutouts, floor to ceiling. It’s as if his world opened up as he explored all the possibilities of his new approach. He comes back to painting, too: lighter, airier, simpler than before, the shapes in his interior still lifes are reduced and refined. Then he strips away the colour, and even in black and white they feel luminous and shocking.
But the cutouts are on another level. So ridiculously bold and graphic, so direct and bright, so decorative. You can almost feel the breeze when Matisse recreates the landscape of Polynesia in collages of blue and white, smell the seaweed when he pastes together a huge vision of swaying fronds.
As the 50s rolled around, Matisse was asked to design a chapel in Vence, and he went all in. Priests’ vestments in green and yellow, stained glass covered in the plant motifs that symbolise his late-life rebirth. It is religious and spiritual but not particularly godly. Sat here, staring up at the maquettes and the gleaming stained glass, I’m not thinking about deities. It’s art I’m communing with.
I first saw the chapel works when I was a kid, as I grew up not far away. They’re one of the main reasons I got into art history. Seeing them here is so moving I never want to leave. They’re affecting in a way that only great art ever really can be.
The famous – and very much objectifying – blue nudes come later, somehow reducing the whole history of nude painting down to four of the simplest images you’ll ever see, shown alongside a final self-portrait in gouache, which is also perfect, obviously.
But this enormous show peaks, for me, with one single painting of a face, black ink on yellow paper. Count the lines: there are seven of them. The bare minimum he needed to convey a face, to paint a life. At 80 years old, sick and weak, he really had it all figured out.