Matisse Cut-Outs To Storm London's Tate Museum

It hasn’t opened yet but the exhibition of Henry Matisse’s colorful, vibrant paper cut-outs at the Tate Modern Museum in London is already lauded as the exhibition of the season and is predicted to become one of the most popular ever staged in Britain.

Old, cranky and unable to paint any longer due to his frail health, which bound him to a wheelchair, the French master dedicated the last years of his life to cutting shapes from painted paper for collages and maquettes that have become iconic, internationally cherished masterpieces, like the four versions of Blue Nude (including Blue Nude 1, one of the most reproduced works of art of all times, loaned by Basel’s Beyeler Foundation.)

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, has been received enthusiastically and praised as an undisputable “winner” of this year’s art scene in Europe . The Tate director and one of the curators, Sir Nicholas Serota, said that "this kind of show just doesn't happen more than once in a lifetime...This is the largest show of this body of works and contains most of the major ones."

“A stunning, uplifting, joyous exhibition that reminds everyone what art is truly about,” writes the critic at Artlyst. “Just entering the exhibition makes you fully aware that you are in the presence of genius. Matisse is so confidant in his style that it appears effortless.  The joy comes from the simplicity of the colour, form and patterns that fill the walls of the  Museum.”

The exhibition brings together 130 works that the French artist, considered one of the most important on the 20^th century, created between 1937 and 1954 by cutting pieces of paper with scissors and gluing them to create art pieces that are among the most admired of our times.

It also explores Matisse’s situation and motivation to start making such original work so late in his life.

The show's organizers argue that the artist's techniques might look simple – paper, scissors, glue – but are both "radical and groundbreaking.”

“Bees swarm, swallows swerve, a shark swims the wall. Pinned to his chest, Icarus's heart explodes...With a pair of giant dress-making scissors, Matisse cut himself free from the miseries of illness and old age, creating luscious cut-outs that unleashed a new art,” Adrian Searle writes in The Guardian.

Along with the hyper-famous four Blue Nudes that are reunited in one room, and the Tate’s own The Snail, the exhibition includes the collages the artist made for books, the preparatory material for a chapel in the French town of Vence, and monumental creations like the underwater world of Oceania, The Sea, teeming with stylized sharks, jelly fish, coral, starfish;  The Parakeet and The Mermaid, and the even larger Large Decoration with Masks which is housed permanently at the National Museum in Washington.

It also recreates the works that hung on the walls of the artist’s studio in the South of France. ”A single room, both studio and bedchamber and the place where he slept and dreamed and suffered from cancer and other miseries and where, when he awoke, he found himself in the midst of his work,” as described by Searle.

The show concludes with the cutout model of a Christmas theme for stained glass commissioned for the Time-Life Building in New York.

Matisse: The Cut-Outs will run from April 17 to September 7 and the Tate is expecting big crowds. "For many people [it] will be the most evocative and compelling show that London has ever seen," the director said.

The exhibition will then tour to the Museum of Modern Art, New York from October 14 to February 9, 2015.