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Review: ‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’ at MoMA follows artist’s paper trail

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Los Angeles Times Art Critic

When Henri Matisse (1869-1954) finished his breakthrough painting “The Joy of Life,” he was 36. A new century was just getting underway, and he flung open a door to an artistic adventure that would occupy him for almost 50 years. The escapade took a leading role in revolutionizing art.

At the Museum of Modern Art, “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” tells the ravishing culmination of the story. The exhibition, beautifully organized and handsomely installed, unfolds with clarity and insight.

Matisse began to make vibrant works from cut paper in the 1940s. Several were included at the conclusion of MoMA’s marvelous retrospective of Matisse’s full career 20 years ago, but there hasn’t been a complete survey of them since 1961 (also at MoMA). The show is long overdue.

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Part of the undeniable appeal of Matisse’s cutouts is their seemingly child-like familiarity. Whether or not you’ve ever made a painting or a sculpture, you’ve probably made a cutout at some point in the past.

I know I have. In elementary school a pair of blunt-nosed scissors was the tool for cutting colored construction paper into the shape of an autumn leaf, a winter mitten or a spring tulip, a shape that would be dutifully pasted down on a sheet of white paper.

That’s all a cutout is. The basic process is no mystery.

But you and I, of course, are not Matisse. He brought a lifetime of daring experiment and consummate skill to the simple technique.

It began in 1905 with “The Joy of Life,” a pastoral landscape showing a theatrical vision of paradise. The painting was built around an unprecedented visual wrestling match between the formal elements of color and line.

Color is an ethereal element of nature, line a man-made invention (it doesn’t exist in nature). Matisse eventually fused the kinetic friction between them in a series of increasingly large, finally monumental collages made by cutting colored paper.

He also brought a distinctive legacy to the task: His father’s family members were weavers. Matisse was born in a tiny, two-room cottage in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis near France’s northern border with Belgium, where Europe’s weaving industry had flourished for centuries.

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Pinning patterns and designs made from cut paper to textile looms was a manufacturing process in use for hundreds of years. You could say that cutouts were in Matisse’s blood — or at least among his earliest memories.

As he aged, painting and sculpture also came to require too much physical exertion. After being diagnosed with cancer in 1941 and surviving a difficult operation, he was often confined to a wheelchair. (He was also a bit of a hypochondriac.) So in his mid-70s he picked up a pair of scissors and some paper, which he employed as his artistic tools for the rest of his life.

At MoMA, the show culminates with large, spectacular cutouts like the six-panel “The Parakeet and the Mermaid” (1952), lent by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the UCLA Hammer Museum’s explosive “The Sheaf” (1953), a visual fireworks display of philodendron-shaped leaves. (It was made as a study for a ceramic-tile wall now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) Pomegranates and leaves probe the negative space of the white ground, their organic contours creating a visual effect of positive spaces between them.

Matisse’s passion for Islamic art was essential to these radical works. Without traditional illusionistic devices, he creates a vibrant sense of fecund movement in what amounts to a paradise garden.

It’s instructive that the two figural elements in the Stedelijk mural are a bird and a mermaid — a mythic creature from the sea. Fluid space is their natural habitat. It’s where Matisse’s art lives too.

The line in a cutout is achieved by the distinct edge cut between colored shapes or between a shape and the white ground, where one jumps to the other. Drawing with scissors is what Matisse called this sharp, blunt delineation.

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He underscored fluidity by making colored paper by hand. Rather than use industrially dyed sheets, he had assistants paint white paper with solid shades of opaque watercolor. Fluid horizontal lines of gouache were laid over vertical strokes — not unlike the warp and weft in weaving — yielding tactile colored textures.

“Jazz,” Matisse’s famous book of jagged collages displaying abstracted elements of a noisy circus, is what confirmed for him the need to make his own colored papers. He worked on it in 1943 and 1944, its raucous subject an inescapable reference to the tragic spectacle of World War II. When the book was finally printed in 1947, however, the artist considered it a failure.

The printing process flattened out the color. The pages are certainly luminous. But comparing the studies with the finished book, juxtaposed in the show, the printed pages feel more inert.

Before “Jazz,” Matisse occasionally used cutouts to compose set designs and costumes for the Ballet Russes. He also used them to lay out the forms in a complicated “Dance” mural, commissioned for the lunettes of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. (since relocated). After “Jazz,” cutouts began to develop into stand-alone works of art.

A commission to design murals, windows and priests’ vestments for the Chapel of the Rosary in the little town of Vence on the French Riviera introduced environmental scale. (The project took four years, completed in 1951.) When he then launched into the monumental cutouts with which the show ends, Matisse made a sudden U-turn: He went back to his own radical artistic beginnings.

The 1907 painting “Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra)” is an almost feral reclining figure that emerged from the luxuriating nudes populating “The Joy of Life.” In 1952, he made a series of cutout blue nudes, voluptuous figures in arabesque shapes nearly 4 feet tall. The figures fill the sheet, pressing against its edges as a sensuous life force writhing within the picture.

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That vivid sense of determined struggle would emerge in the final works, sometimes in symbolic ways.

Take the ripe, visually bursting pomegranates of “The Parakeet and the Mermaid,” completed following the Vence chapel. The fruit is a traditional Christian symbol for suffering and redemption, clutched in the hands of the Virgin Mary or the infant Jesus in paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and many more. And Islam’s Koran says pomegranates grow in the garden of paradise.

Intentionally or not, Matisse also went back even further than his own artistic history, all the way to an early stirring of what would become Modern art. In mid-1800s Paris, the ferocious rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix turned on a feud over which was primary for successful painting — drawing or color. In his cutouts, Matisse brought the dispute to a stunning end.

The MoMA show, seen during the summer at London’s Tate Modern (its only other venue), was inspired by conservation work being done on “The Swimming Pool,” a large, watery Matisse cutout that once graced three walls of the artist’s dining room. It now belongs to MoMA and is being shown for the first time in 20 years.

Having a conservator (the museum’s Karl Buchberg) work on the splendid exhibition (with MoMA’s drawings curators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman) turns out to have been critically important to its success. Conservators approach art as tactile, physical objects. For Matisse, knowledge gained through sensuous physicality makes all the difference.

Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, (212) 708-9431, through Feb. 8. https://www.moma.org

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Twitter: @KnightLAT

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