Henri Matisse - A Cut Above the Rest The Culture Show

In January 1941,

just months after the Nazis had descended on Paris,

their invading army spreading out

and infecting the rest of Europe like a deadly virus, an elderly

man lay on a hospital bed, fighting his own private battle for survival.

Henri Matisse had just undergone an emergency operation

for intestinal cancer, which had threatened to wipe him out.

But against all the odds, he pulled through...

..and from this near-fatal event became one of the greatest

rebirths in the history of 20th-century modern art, which

saw Matisse go on to create some of the most joyful, vibrant

and life-affirming images, that have yet to be

rivalled for their originality and daring - the cut-outs.

Matisse was great because he had the audacity of simplicity, always,

to reduce things to the most simple possible way.

Really inventive artists are always looking for new

ways of reading the world and of expressing a new vocabulary,

and that's essentially what Matisse was doing. You know, what a man!

Many people would have packed it in and called it a day.

He was mortally ill.

He could no longer do what he'd done all his life. Blow me!

Matisse just invents a new art form.

Now partly confined to a wheelchair and bed,

Matisse sought a different means of drawing in colour.

Scissors replaced a paintbrush and, with the unique skill of a tailor,

he set about creating his now famous cut-outs.

For me, Matisse's cut-outs are his strongest works,

and not just because they're visually attractive,

because beneath those explosive colours

and all that beautiful distillation of form,

you find these intriguing snatches of Matisse, the man.

In fact, I'd argue that for all their abstraction, his cut-outs

are among the most revealing works of art that Matisse ever made.

Today, Matisse is one of the most celebrated and popular

artists of the 20th century and any show of his will draw a crowd.

Even during his own lifetime,

he enjoyed a level of popularity envied by other artists.

He was celebrated as a master draughtsman

and a painter of decorative and highly coloured works,

some shockingly daring with their almost primitive, simplified

forms, others more conventionally appealing with their languorous,

seductive-looking creatures set in exotic harems.

Today, though, it is cut-outs from the final decade of his life

that capture the public's imagination.

But it wasn't always like that.

When Matisse started producing these groundbreaking works of art,

many thought that they were just the outpourings of a senile old

man who'd completely lost touch with reality.

People thought that they were infantile, decorative,

certainly not to be taken seriously as works of art.

In fact, there was one particularly vicious critic who called them

paper jokes.

Many were never exhibited in his lifetime and it took a full 20

years after his death for people to start to recognise their importance.

Someone who did recognise just how groundbreaking these works

were at the time was Matisse's great friend and friendly rival, Picasso.

Picasso had understood Matisse long before anybody else.

When he first arrived in Paris,

he knew what he was up against the minute he saw Matisse's paintings.

The same thing - in the 1940s, Picasso would arrive regularly.

"I know what he wants," Matisse said. "He wants to see my cut-outs."

Because nobody had ever done anything like that.

I think Matisse was working ahead of his time for most of his career.

The late cut-outs established a new language for art that artists

subsequently have been working hard to digest.

of Matisse's cut-outs to date

in what's bound to be a blockbuster show.

And Nicholas Serota has taken the unusual step of curating.

I sometimes feel like you're characterised as quite

reserved in the press,

but I can sense that you feel passionately about these cut-outs.

I think they are amongst the most emotionally moving works

made in the second half of the 20th century.

And I'm characterised as only being interested in minimal art,

but Matisse has always been very, very close to my heart.

And I've wanted to do this show for 30 years.

And the Tate owns The Snail.

It's one of the great works of the final phase.

And so, to build on that and to make a show that we'll never see again...

I mean, we say that about exhibitions, but I don't think

anyone will ever get together this number of cut-outs again.

In London's Victoria and Albert Museum

lies a work that opened what's arguably

the most revealing chapter in Matisse's life and career.

This is a very beautiful, precious object and it's called Jazz.

And it's a limited edition book.

It was published in 1947

and it contains 20 reproductions of some of the earliest paper

cut-outs that Matisse began producing after his operation.

The thing that strikes me is the extraordinary vibrancy,

this kind of fierce colour.

And in a way, that reminds me of pop art, that boldness of form,

the simplicity, the graphicness of these images.

And yet, this book predates that whole pop art movement by well

over a decade, so Matisse is ahead of his time.

He's creating something that feels simple. It's joyous. It's childlike.

At the same time, there's a whole different strand,

a different note, if you like, the note of something slightly dark.

And it's important to remember that

when you're flicking through the book

because the context of this creation was this exceptionally

difficult period in the '40s when Matisse came through this operation,

which almost killed him, and when the Second World War was raging.

And you see these odd notes of that hinterland.

So for instance, here,

this is a very famous image of the mythical character Icarus,

who's flown too close to the sun and is suddenly plunging down,

falling from the skies.

And he's against this blue sky with these yellow stars.

But the yellow stars could be something else.

In the context of the war, these could be exploding shells.

These are fire bursts.

And this black shape, silhouetted against the sky, could be a corpse.

You can almost feel that Matisse is trying to articulate

something of his own near-death experience.

And yet, the overall effect of the book is clearly one of joy.

It's one of rejuvenation.

This is a second life, an afterlife, for Matisse.

You can feel his relief at this reprieve from death

following his life-threatening operation.

And out of these pages come tumbling clowns. You find acrobats...

..jugglers, high-wire walkers, trapeze artists.

There's a sword swallower and you see a knife thrower.

And I can't help feeling that all of these mesmerising

and skilled performers actually represent, in a sense,

Matisse himself because he often said that

when he was making art, he felt like an acrobat or a juggler.

And what you see here is his articulation of that creative

process.

He's talking about that meditative state of intensity

and concentration that was required for him

to be able to perform this dextrous, quick,

spontaneous scissor work, which is

comparable to the same state of mind that a knife thrower needs to

be in just before executing that pin-sharp act.

Matisse's new method of working was to cut straight into large

pieces of coloured paper that were then pinned to the

walls of his studio by his assistants.

One of these was Jacqueline Duheme, who was just 21

when she came to work for Matisse in 1948.

Now in her late 80s, she's still working as a children's book

illustrator and has vivid memories of her time spent with Matisse.

Jacqueline was lucky enough to start working with

Matisse at a crucial turning point in his career.

The very important thing to say is that

although the cut-outs began, in part, while he was ill,

and he worked on Jazz as he was recuperating from operation,

he actually chose to leave painting behind. He could still paint.

The final paintings from around 1948 are incredible.

However, he chooses to focus exclusively on the cut-outs

and to really think, you know, what the potential of this medium is.

So for him, this was an all-enveloping passion, I think.

He began to use these shapes initially as a means

of constructing paintings, but they then gained an independent life.

I think he began to see a potential in them

that no-one else had ever seen.

And so, he then began to work on a larger scale.

Of course, because he was infirm, it gave him the opportunity to make

works on a much grander scale than he could have achieved as a painter.

He covered the whole wall with cut-outs. Brilliant, pure colour.

I mean, extraordinary intensity. And people just said it's like...

Again and again, his visitors described the whole place inside

as a magician's cave and Matisse, of course, was the magician.

And Picasso and his companion, Francoise Gilot,

felt this especially, so much so that one day,

they brought him a present and it was a real magician.

They brought him to Matisse's bedside.

And Matisse, in return, offered to make portraits of both of them,

right there, on the spot.

Matisse was in his bed, with large scissors.

I couldn't believe the scissors were that large.

And with a great skill, he would do whatever shape he wanted.

He did that very fast, with dynamism.

He just went in a very spontaneous manner. It was creation itself.

He had reached a moment in his life when he was at one in his mind

and his body, so it was...

That's why he could be, at last, spontaneous, I think.

At the time Matisse began working on his cut-outs,

he was living in this villa in the hillside town of Vence.

He'd moved here in 1943 to escape the Allied bombings of Nice

and to recuperate from his painful operation that had left him

bedbound, except for brief bursts of energy which allowed him

to venture outside and seek inspiration for his work.

Matisse loved living here, at the Villa Le Reve.

He particularly relished wandering about in these beautiful

gardens and he found almost spiritual

significance in sketching the flowers and the trees.

And coming here, you can

sense why he felt that studying nature was almost a form of prayer.

Villa Le Reve provided a much-needed oasis of calm for Matisse who,

by now, required round-the-clock care.

Despite his ill health, Matisse set about creating his new

artworks with single-minded determination.

Matisse couldn't live if he couldn't work, literally. Literally.

And I think those last years, when he made the cut-outs and when

he was an invalid, bedridden, were a complete illustration of that.

He had to invent an artform which he could still practise

and practise with the intensity and the passion and pour into it

the energy and power that he had then as he always had had.

In 1948, Matisse embarked on one of his most ambitious projects -

the Chapel of the Rosary, just down the road from his villa in Vence.

Matisse designed and decorated every last detail of the chapel,

right down to the colourful vestments worn by the priest,

which were created with his new technique of cut-outs.

The commission for the chapel came about as a result of a close

friendship he'd formed with sister Jacques-Marie,

who'd nursed him after his operation.

Her convent had no chapel so, to thank her for her care,

he had one built.

The chapel was a labour of love for the increasingly frail Matisse,

but the scale of the operation did little to daunt him.

As builders set to work on the foundations,

he set to work designing the ceramic murals with

the aid of a charcoal-tipped bamboo stick

and making the full-sized cut-outs that were

the templates for his monumental stained-glass windows.

There to assist him was Jacqueline Duheme, who was

expected to keep up with the furious pace at which Matisse worked.

Completing his chapel required a monumental effort on Matisse's

part, but all the hard work that he

and his assistants put into it paid off spectacularly.

Matisse was really proud of this chapel.

In fact, he considered it his masterpiece.

And when you come inside, I really feel that you can sense why at once.

I find this a profoundly moving, quite magical space, and the reason

for that is because Matisse is doing something where it feels effortless.

And he's done that with very few elements.

Stained-glass windows along the nave,

just using three colours,

and these bounce off these very pared-down graphic, linear,

ceramic black-and-white murals along the other side of the chapel.

St Dominic, the Virgin with the Christ Child,

and at the far end of the chapel, the stations of the cross -

a tragic, violent subject matter, not at all typical of Matisse.

And he spoke of an effect that you have in this chapel, which is

harnessing light, using it like he'd previously used paint.

And you find these thick,

glowing lozenges of light as the sunlight streams through

and casts patterns in different light all over the white

marble floor, which is part of the piece.

Do you know,

I think, in a funny way, he loved working with the Church

because the Catholic Church has always dealt in extremes,

and these were people totally at home with

the language of penance, of submission, of sacrifice.

But Matisse was a complete atheist.

He never really entertained the possibility of God.

He had shed that very early on.

God, in the conventional sense, nonsensical to him.

But he understood that attitude of giving absolutely everything.

When he was pressed about his belief, Matisse answered,

"Do I believe in God?

"Yes, when I work."

And I feel that that's what this chapel conveys - a sense of

this healing spiritual power that sustained him in his work.

And I suspect that's why he was so proud of the chapel,

because Matisse was a man who suffered.

He suffered from anxiety and depression.

And then here, he managed to create, at long last,

towards the end of his life, a haven of peace.

Anyone walking into that space who doesn't feel great emotion

is incapable of feeling.

It has to be one of the great works made anywhere, at any time.

The Sistine ceiling, Vence Chapel -

I wouldn't want to choose between the two.

But though today, many consider the chapel his masterpiece,

when it was finally consecrated in 1951, the nuns,

for whom it had been built, weren't totally convinced.

The model for the Virgin Mary was Jacqueline Duheme.

Though Matisse was clearly attracted by the piety of the church,

the siren call of the female form would prove irresistible.

In the early '50s, Matisse embarked on a series of vibrant works that

combined his love of the female form with his love of dancing figures.

And from this particularly productive period

came his four Blue Nudes, which are now some of his most famous works.

This is the one that he worked on first.

Of the four nudes, this is my favourite

because you can see how much effort went into creating this image.

It's very clear that he's deciding to change things.

He's cutting out new strips and patches, little bits of paper,

and layering them up

so that there's a very tangible presence to the whole figure.

She feels like almost a piece of sculpture.

And it took him two weeks of intensive work and effort

and energy just to finalise her form.

But once he was pleased with what he created

and he'd laid the foundations, he could then go on to execute

the other three nudes in the series in just a matter of hours.

The Blue Nudes are amongst the most famous images of the second

half of the 20th century.

They have an amazing visceral energy.

And it's not just flat colour.

It's colour that really comes and grabs you by the throat.

But is this the secret of why they've become so famous,

so emblematic?

I mean, is it to do with the fact that they're remarkably sensuous

or that they have this promise of some kind of Arcadian idyll?

What do you think their secret is?

I think their secret is the economy with which they were made...

..the sense in which they stand for every potential move of the

female body, the fact that they were evidently so lovingly made.

And there's something incredibly sensuous about them.

figure with renewed vigour in his last few years.

This is a cut-out called Creole Dancer, and I absolutely love

it because it just explodes with all of this energy and vitality.

You can see this central figure, based loosely on an African-American

dancer called Katherine Dunham, and she's performing before our eyes.

She's twirling and spiralling off, almost.

She reminds me of a kind of floral jack-in-the-box,

shooting up this way.

And I think I love it all the more

because it was created by Matisse in 1950, when he was 80 years old.

I find it astounding that such a frankly old man could create

something with so much life that throbs with vitality.

In the final few years, he knows that his time is finite and

he's racing from one composition, from one commission, to the next.

And what's incredible is that they become...

There's an escalation of scale, they become more ambitious,

he becomes more prolific. It's rather extraordinary.

Towards the end of his life, Matisse made another push to reach

the finishing line, creating The Snail.

This huge work, which measures 3x3 metres,

has always been a star attraction for the Tate and is currently

undergoing restoration in time for their big cut-out exhibition.

The Snail is something around which the Tate literally revolves, but what

is, I think, extraordinary about it is the fact that it's

so close to a work made by a child of six.

It has the freshness, it has the freedom,

and yet, it was very, very carefully composed.

So it is a great work of art based on enormous restraint

but also enormous experience of how colours sit together.

Looking at The Snail without its protective glass is really

very special because you get a brilliant sense of its vast

scale and the tremendous vitality of the work and also these

scorching bright colours that feel like they're attacking your eyes.

And it's extraordinary to think that he finished

this off the year before he died.

One of his models said he'd been in a hurry all his life,

and by now, it was really, for him, a race, an endurance course,

which he was running with death.

And you sense that here. You feel he's in a rush.

At times, he's even just tearing straight into the paper.

He's no longer using scissors.

You feel that he's working hard to get what he wanted to say out

because he was so conscious that, for him, time was running out.

I think you always have to remember he was a mortally ill old man

when he made these things and he knew it.

And he always said, "I'm living on borrowed time."

And he knew that every day could be his last.

And so every day became absolutely key for him

and he had to use every second.

And he did. He did.

On 3 November 1954, aged 84,

Matisse died after suffering a heart attack.

He had lived with extraordinary intensity throughout his life

and he started to die. And that took him three days.

Three days for his heart to absolutely actually pack up.

I think that shows you the tenacity, the strength, of a man who said

if willpower's not enough, you've got to fall back on pigheadedness.

He just was tough, Matisse.

Just ten days after Matisse died, the popular magazine Paris Match

went to press with a special tribute to the artist.

The cover had a photograph - it's a wonderful picture

- of Matisse intently working on his cut-outs

with a trusted female assistant by his side.

And the text at the bottom runs, "Just a few weeks before his

"death, this master of contemporary painting is working on his cut-outs.

"He is 84 years old and this is the last expression of his art."

But I wonder how much Matisse himself

considered his cut-outs his final artistic statement, because for

Matisse, by the end, art and life had become inextricably entwined.

He was working furiously, right up until the moment of his death.

And had he lived any longer, there's no doubt, in my mind,

that his art would have continued to develop in all

sorts of astonishing and surprising, exciting new directions.

I have a hunch that Matisse the magician had a few other

artistic tricks up his sleeve.