Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors. Late Works 1950-1954
image and caption, top left left of main text
Colin Hambrook reviews a touring exhibition by one of the most important French painters of the 20th century
I recently caught the touring exhibition of Matisse's lithographs at Victoria Art Gallery in Bath and found myself pondering the effect that Disability Arts is having on the approach curators take when putting exhibitions together. The collection of lithographs was prepared under Matisse's direction, very shortly before his death in 1954. The images being carefully rendered copies of the cut-outs he made using scissors and coloured gouache paper. It was a technique Matisse had been developing since 1941, when he fell ill and became a wheelchair user.
I was excited by the fact that the supporting material presented the artist's impairment in a positive light. It wouldn't have happened 5 or 10 years ago. A photograph showed Matisse in a wheelchair, scissors and paper in hand. He is in the process of creating cut-outs for The Parakeet and the Mermaid. Behind the artist a wall is filled with an assemblage of the forms, which make up the finished work. There is maybe nothing unusual there but, instead of the supporting text either saying nothing about the artist's disability or presenting him as a tragic genius, it describes how Matisse was guided towards making work for which he is most remembered as a natural progression. The technique was the obvious choice as it meant he could work at a table with his ideas for bringing colour and shape together, fermenting in his mind, as he used scissors as a drawing tool. He said: The paper cut-out allows me to draw in the colour … Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it …I draw straight into the colour
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The exhibition consists of 40 colour lithographs, printed by the Mourlot and Draeger Brothers and published in the form of a limited edition artist's book entitled Verve by Tériade in 1958, four years after the artist's death. It includes many of Matisse's iconic images, including The Snail - the original is owned by Tate Collection and usually on display at Tate Modern - and the Blue Nudes.
Curating from a disability perspective is an important and powerful challenge and one that I hope will become more widespread. As I was walking around I overheard a woman talking to her friend. I had no idea he was confined to a wheelchair. What a shame. I suppose this was all he could do,
she said. The intensity of Matisse's vision and the level of achievement he realised, clearly went over her head. But his issues as an artist are exposed in a way that engages with disability. It's a healthy exposure, which I believe promises to help raise the debate about disability arts in the long run of things.
Matisse Late Works 1950-1954. Verve No 35-36, 1958
last updated: 2005-04-01 00:00:00
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tags : assemblage visual arts