If you can get a ticket for the Matisse “cut-out” exhibition at the Tate Modern – go!
There have been two shows at this gallery that have moved me beyond words- one was the Rothko retrospective some five years ago- this is the other.
A picture is worth a thousand words so this blog will be about the pictures and not my reaction.
But I was struck by one observation by Matisse about these works . He mentioned that his pictures should work like music- not on the intellect but on a purely emotional level.
TS Eliot wrote tbat poetry should aspire to the fixity of music, a phrase I took to mean that it should have an emotional impact (as well of course as challenging the brain).
Making sense of these pictures is easy in emotional terms – but hard intellectually- these pictures are hard to explain.
Thanks to the kind people at the Tate who looked away as I clicked my way round the gallery. Thanks to Linklaters for making it possible for me to see these works in the quiet of a Tuesday evening.
I am flying now to Nice where I will be seeing the museum and the church that add the light of the South of France- the only thing missing from a wonderful exhibition.
GO!
“By creating these coloured paper cut-outs, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come. I don’t think that I have ever found such balance as I have in creating these paper cut-outs. But I know that it will only be much later that people will realise to what extend the work I am doing today is in step with the future” -Matisse
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It is no longer the brush that slips and slides over the canvas, it is the scissors that cut into the paper and into the colour. The conditions of the journey are 100% different. The contour of the figure springs from the discovery of the scissors that give it the movement of circulating life. This tool doesn’t modulate, it doesn’t brush on , but it incises in , underline this well ,because the criteria of observation will be different’- Matisse
“With my eyes wide open I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid. It is only now that these wonders have
returned to me with tenderness and clarity”- Matisse
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