Matisse, Review 1941-1954 – Success after success in a life-enhancing display of genius | art

FOr forget the joy and energy of youth – perhaps your best days are ahead. Henri Matisse was like that, even when he was barely coming out of surgery alive in his early 70s as war was raging across France. Sitting in his wheelchair, his hand wobbly and weaker than ever, his body barely able to muster the strength to stand and paint, he reinvented himself and reshaped modern art in the process.

The Grand Palais’s exploration of the final years of Matisse’s life—from his surgery in 1941 until his death in 1954—is a delightful, dazzling celebration of color, form, line, light, and then the full spectrum of color. It’s so good, so beautiful, so overwhelming. It was always going to be this way – it is Matisse, with all the resources of the vast French collection of Matisse’s works. It’s a show full of traffic.

The exhibition starts out small, even claustrophobic. In his studio in Nice, Matisse paints still lifes. Red tulips, lilac-fleshed oysters, lemons, mimosas, greens, reds and yellows. War was looming over the Riviera. In 1944, the artist’s wife and daughter, who secretly joined the resistance, were arrested by the Gestapo. German planes were flying overhead. If these paintings seem light and airy, they are not. It’s small and cramped, and gets reworked over and over again. Matisse draws the same set of models, moving them around the room, opening slats to let in light, and moving screens to create shadows. It’s deliberately obsessive, repetitive and cinematic, as if he’s creating dozens of cinematic takes of the same scene.

But this repetition, and his newfound love of drawing, sparked something in Henry. In his “Themes and Variations” series, he paints the same reclining woman, the same vase of flowers, the same face, over and over again, each time improving the line, simplifying the image, reducing everything to its simplest components. “You’ve got a form filtered down to its essentials,” he said.

This is technical revolution number one here. The second involves dropping the paintbrush and pens entirely and picking up the scissors. This is the late Matisse we all know – the radical compositions, the jagged shapes, the stunning color boldness – and it starts here. In 1944, he was asked to write a book about color, and he spoke briefly. This book’s figures are full of swirling foliage, diving bodies, blue skies, purple funerals, white elephants, and a stunning black Icarus falling before a swirl of yellow stars. He called the book “Jazz,” as if he was making strings of color. It’s a stunning moment in art, beautifully rendered here, although the contemporary jazz soundtrack 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 with partitions, from floor to ceiling. It is as if his world has opened up as he explores all the possibilities of his new approach. He returned to painting as well: lighter, airier and simpler than before, and the forms in his interior still lifes were reduced and refined. Then he strips it of color, and even in black and white, it looks luminous and shocking.

But breakers are on another level. Ridiculously bold and graphic, very direct and bright, and very decorative. You can almost feel the breeze when Matisse recreates Polynesian landscapes in bands of blue and white, and smell the seaweed when he glues together a massive vision of swaying fronds.

As the 1950s wore on, Matisse was asked to design a chapel in Vence, which he agreed to do. The priests’ robes are green and yellow, and the stained glass is covered with floral decorations symbolizing his rebirth at the end of his life. It is religious and spiritual but not particularly pious. I’m sitting here staring at the figures and the bright stained glass, not thinking about the gods. It’s the art I connect with.

I first saw the church in action when I was a child, growing up not far away. It’s one of the main reasons I decided to go into art history. Seeing them here is very moving and I never want to leave. They make an impact in a way that only great art can.

The famous – and very risqué – blue nudes come later, somehow reducing the entire history of nude painting to four of the simplest images you will ever see, shown alongside a final self-portrait in gouache, which is also perfect, obviously.

But this enormous display culminates, for me, in a single painting of a face, in black ink on yellow paper. Count the lines: There are seven of them. The minimum he needs for facial expression and life drawing. At 80 years old, sick and weak, he had truly figured it all out.