Photo Luc Castel 2026
It would be tempting to skip the Henri Matisse exhibition from the Pompidou Center at the Grand Palais (as the Pompidou is closed for renovations). Like with Van Gogh, when a museum wants to stage a blockbuster exhibition which will attract hundreds of thousands of people, it stages a Matisse show. There recently was Matisse, L’Atelier Rouge at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, before that, Matisse, comme un Roman, at the Pompidou Center, Matisse Métamorphoses and Hockney-Matisse, in Nice, Marguerite et Matisse at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain and the Origins of Fauvism at the Met, etc.
But skipping this exhibition, simply titled Matisse 1941 - 1954, would be a mistake. It centers around 300 stunning works the painter made in the last 13 years of his life. Henri Matisse had undergone life threatening surgery, but he came out of it regenerated, bursting with energy and ideas. These years are “a moment of synthesis, radicalness and formal invention.” At the age of nearly 80, in his apartment in the Régina hotel, in Nice, he reinvented himself with gouache cut-outs through which he entirely renewed his visual vocabulary and gave a monumental scope to his art.
Photo Luc Castel 2026
The already rich collection of Centre Pompidou is complemented by exceptional loans from private collections and national and international institutions such as the Hammer Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Barnes Foundation and Fondation Beyeler.
Among the highlights of the exhibition: The Jazz album, conceived almost like a musical score. It consists of 21 plates of pure colours, assembled by Matisse with a musical rhythm, as they are separated from each other by thoughts written in his large calligraphy, pushed to the point of becoming drawings. Published in 1947, it was the first time Matisse used the technique of gouache-painted paper cuts. Cut-outs began with sheets of paper brushed in bold gouache. Once the colors dried, Matisse “drew with scissors.” “Cutting directly into colour reminds me of a sculptor’s carving into stone,” explained Matisse.The exhibition exceptionally presents all of the album’s plates alongside their maquettes made of gouache-painted paper cut-outs, which are held in the Centre Pompidou collections.
Photo Luc Castel 2026
Other highlights: Les Intérieurs de Vence (Vence Interiors), made between 1946 and 1948. 11 of them, from the collections of the Pompidou Center, but also from the Barnes Foundation as well as the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Milan) and the Beyeler Foundation, are presented together. These color saturated works are often seen as Matisse’s farewell to painting. “References to past and present works run through the paintings which echo one another and can be seen as a retrospective dive into the foundations of his practice,” explains the museum. “Never has color been given such an expansive quality as it extends the pictorial space beyond the limits of the frames.”
Matisse 1941 - 1954 also presents an outstanding series of cut outs which became his favorite medium. “Cut-outs are only very rarely displayed in museum rooms because they are light-sensitive and therefore particularly fragile,” explains the museum. “ The last exhibitions dedicated to gouache cut-outs were held in 2014 at Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York. This is the first time since a 1961 exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris that the public is able to discover this essential part of his practice that left an enduring legacy among artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Henri Matisse, Acanthes (Acanthus), 1953 Charcoal and gouache paper cut-outs, pasted on paper mounted on canvas, 311.7 × 351.8 cm Riehen/Beyeler/ Photo Robert Bayer
Henri Matisse, Nu bleu I (Blue Nude I), 1952 Gouache paper cut-outs, pasted on paper mounted on canvas, 106.3 × 78 cm, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, collection Beyeler / Photo : Robert Bayer
The large panels from the collections of the Mobilier National titled Polynésie, le ciel (Polynesia, the Sky) and Polynésie, la mer (Polynesia, the Sea), and the masterpiece La Tristesse du roi (The Sorrow of the King), are complemented by Les Bêtes de la mer (Beasts of the Sea [National Gallery of Art, Washington]) and two rare figure compositions : Danseuse créole (Creole Dancer [Musée Matisse Nice]) and Zulma (Statens Museum for Kunst). Lastly, the four large and masterful compositions made in 1953, namely La Gerbe (The Sheaf [Hammer Museum, Los Angeles]), Acanthes (Acanthus (Fondation Beyeler]), L’Escargot (The Snail [Tate Modern, London]) and Mémoire d’Océanie (Memory of Oceania [MoMA, New York]), are displayed together for the first time in France. About these works, Matisse said "You cannot imagine how much, in the cut-outs period, the sensation of flying that was unleashed in me helped me to refine the motion of my hand when it guided the path of my scissors. It’s rather difficult to explain. I would say it was a kind of linear, graphic equivalent to the sensation of flying.”
Photo Luc Castel, 2026
Near the end of the exhibition, visitors reach the magnificent work Matisse did between 1948 and 1952: the chapel for Dominican nuns in the town of Vence, in southern France. This part is particularly moving and stunning. He designed the entire decorative programme of the building including the murals, the stained-glass windows, liturgical furnishings and vestments. Matisse worked to scale, on the walls of his large studio in the Régina, to make the maquettes for the windows or the preparatory brush drawings for the ceramic murals.The exhibition features two maquettes for the chapel’s stained-glass windows and a series of six maquettes for chasubles (from the collections of Centre Pompidou), as well as a large brush drawing of Saint Dominic.
After the Vence chapel, Henri Matisse was commissioned by private collectors to design stained-glass windows with no religious purpose. The Grand Palais features 2 magnificent stained-glass windows: La Vigne (The Vine), a stained-glass work donated to Centre Pompidou by the Monnier-Matisse family in 2024. It is revealed to the public for the first time. It was designed in 1953 to adorn the staircase of the villa of Matisse's son, Pierre, and his wife Patricia, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Finally, thanks to an exceptional loan from MoMA, the exhibition also reveals the beauty of the stained-glass window titled Nuit de Noël (Christmas Eve), commissioned by Life Magazine in 1952.
These monumental stained-glass works are very rarely exhibited due to their fragility and their complex installation process.
One leaves the Matisse exhibition yearning to start again, to be in the presence of color and light and life once again. The mind will carry these extraordinary works long after the show has been dismantled. That’s Henri Matisse’s magic.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Matisse 1941 - 1954. Centre Pompidou - Grand Palais. Until July 26, 2026. centrepompidou.fr
Henri Matisse, Branche de prunier, fond vert (Plum Branch, Green Background), 1948, Oil on canvas, 116 × 88.9 cm Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin Photo © GABRIELE CROPPI/Scala, Florence
