Matisse stood apart from his contemporaries, who often staged themselves with dramatic personas. Salvador Dalí had a mustache and was always ready to deliver new egomaniacal audacities, Marcel Duchamp was ironic with his chess game, and Picasso wore a striped shirt and had a growing entourage of admirers. In contrast, Matisse was far from the heroic self-centeredness that recurred among many of his contemporaries; in his work, the colors themselves played the leading role. This unique approach set him apart in an era where all of Matisse's contemporaries staged themselves.
The power of Matisse's colors was evident already in the early years of the 20th century when he was part of a movement called Fauvism. The now-forgotten critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term 'les fauves' (the wild beasts) after seeing the autumn salon in Paris in 1905, with his comment being derogatory, but the name stuck and became the movement's official designation. Instead of trying to imitate nature, these colorists chose 'unnatural' and 'wild' colors. In his portraits, Matisse used green, blue, and red to capture the emotional state of a face, and he soon came to regard color as an independent language. The historical or artistic significance of 'les fauves' beyond its derogatory origin remains a topic of discussion among art historians.
He makes the colors sing.
Matisse's health condition during these years forced a new way of working. In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with stomach cancer and underwent an operation, which weakened him so severely that it became impossible to continue painting as before. Instead, Matisse had sheets colored in clear, saturated colors, then cut out shapes with scissors, and arranged the fragments directly on the wall or on canvases, often with pins. These 'gouaches découpées' (paper cut-outs) gave Matisse freedom to experiment with compositions in a new way, becoming a radical new start that he described as a second life. Instead of mixing pigments on a palette, Matisse let the color exist in its purest form, a method that defined his late period.
The exhibition includes photographs and films of Matisse, offering personal glimpses of the artist. In these materials, Matisse is seen as a sturdy man with a gray beard and steel-rimmed glasses, lying sick and heavy in bed, drawing outlines on the wall with a long stick, and sitting in a wheelchair conversing with a Catholic nun. These intimate moments provide insight into his life during this transformative phase, though the specific works by Matisse from 1941-1954 featured in the exhibition are not detailed in available reports.
He invented a joy that did not exist before him.
Artistic praise for Matisse endures, with his work continuing to inspire mystery. According to DN Kultur, Pablo Picasso described Matisse as making the colors sing, and Picasso considered Henri Matisse the only colleague he viewed as a real rival. According to DN Kultur, Louis Aragon described Matisse as inventing a joy that did not exist before him. No one has succeeded in explaining why Matisse's colors are so joy-inducing, but this realization is evident in the late works, where Matisse increasingly succeeded in concentrating his expression to its most basic elements: pure color and simple forms. The exact duration or end date of the exhibition, as well as how many visitors are expected or have attended, remain unspecified, and it is unclear if any contemporary artists or critics are quoted about the exhibition's impact beyond historical figures.