Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years,

we've been filming

the biggest exhibitions,

art galleries

and museums in the world

about some of the greatest artists

and art in history.

Not only do we record landmark shows,

but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes.

We then use this as a springboard to take a broader look

at extraordinary artists.

These films play first in the cinema as Exhibition On Screen,

then we re-version for television.

One of the most popular shows of recent times,

here in London and in New York, was Matisse's The Cut-Outs.

Given the delicate nature of the work,

it was genuinely a once-in-a-lifetime show.

So we were delighted to capture it for posterity.

Henri Matisse is one of those artists

whose energy and inventiveness run deep throughout his entire life.

His is a colourful story in every sense,

that resulted in many great works, culminating in a late period

where brushes were replaced by scissors.

Ground-breaking, three-dimensional and emotional works that, to me,

are as fresh and powerful today, as the day they were made.

More than that, this is also a film about

how vital our great art institutions are in supporting artists,

conserving their work and time and time again,

taking on the challenges of bringing together a major show.

This exhibition, ultimately, and unsurprisingly,

proved to be a smash hit in both cities.

For those of you who missed it, you may never see its like again.

Except here, in this latest film from Great Art.

"The work is an emanation, the projection of self.

"My drawings and my canvasses are pieces of myself.

"Their totality constitutes Henri Matisse.

"The work represents, expresses, perpetuates.

"I have always believed that a large part of

"the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle

"which an artist wages with his limited medium.

"Scissors can acquire more feeling for line than pencil or charcoal.

"Cutting directly into colour reminds me

"of a sculptor's carving into stone.

"The cut-out is what I have now found

"the simplest and most direct way to express myself."

There are certain artists that just demand

an intense, concerted look

and those efforts often require very large exhibitions

to fully place the work in context.

They're enormous undertakings, they take time,

they take enormous resources, but they're worth it,

because they offer the public an opportunity

to see extraordinary work at a level that would otherwise be impossible.

We've managed to pull together some of the great works

that Matisse made in the last decade of his life

and I don't think they'll ever be together again in quite this way,

so to have them in London and then in New York is really...

as they say, a lifetime experience.

Every now and again, work suddenly comes into focus

and it seems highly relevant to try and show it.

Being a curator is about many things,

but it's very much for me about installing the work in the gallery,

sometimes working with the artists, sometimes, as in this case,

trying to imagine what the artist would have wanted.

You've been thinking about this work for years

and suddenly, it's in front of you

and your responsibility is, in a way,

to try and bring the best out of the work.

We're in room number five

and we're towards the end of the install,

so the end of the second week.

I've been working on it for two years and a half,

so now it's quite exciting to see it all come together.

So as you can see behind me, the hang is a cluster,

it looks like it's almost exploding.

We chose this hang, because we wanted to mimic,

in a way, the way Matisse himself

hung these works on the walls of his studio.

The way we see them today is framed and nicely-prepared works,

but they had a life

which was much more malleable once upon a time.

There's no perfect way to install a room.

You have to work with the grain of the architecture of the building.

There are certain works of a certain size

that have to go on a given wall, cos it's a certain length,

but beyond that,

it's all about creating relationships and interval.

There is always an adjustment to be made

and you make that adjustment with your eye

and your body and your feel.

It's all about feel.

Not only he's inventing a medium,

but he's inventing a medium in which he encapsulates

every other medium he's ever worked with.

When you step into the show, you see works are this size,

so they're quite intimate

and then, as you walk through, it just grows and grows and grows

until it, like, fills in whole rooms.

I mean, it's the idea that this has become so powerful

that he's decided to completely immerse himself in it.

We're trying to leave enough space

for people to be able to see the work

and have something like the experience that I have

when I hang it,

just trying to sense what these works are telling us.

"First of all I drew the snail from nature,

"holding it between two fingers, drew and redrew.

"I became aware of an unfolding.

"I formed in my mind a purified sign for a shell.

"The decision of the line comes from the artist's profound conviction.

"I find myself representing objects devoid of perspective lines,

"attached to one another by feeling...

"..with an atmosphere created by colours.

"There is no separation

"between my old pictures and my cut-outs,

"except that with greater completeness and abstraction,

"I have attained a form filtered to its essentials."

Henri Matisse was born in a busy textile town

in northern France on the last day of 1869.

Matisse grew up in the misty light of the region,

with its rainy days and long, hard winters.

His father, a successful grain merchant,

planned for his son to become a lawyer,

but, aged 20, while in bed recovering from appendicitis,

Henri's life changed when his mother bought him a painting set.

"From the moment I held the box of colours in my hands,

"I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast

"that plunges towards the thing it loves.

"I was a lawyer's clerk, but other people's quarrels

"interested me much less than painting."

This is Matisse's first work,

painted within a year of opening that first box of colours.

It shows a prodigious talent.

In 1891, the 21-year-old Henri Matisse

travelled to Paris to enter an art academy.

He had chosen his path, to become an artist.

The early years of Matisse's training in Paris

in a way characterised a motif

that would run throughout his career,

which on the one hand is about acquiring

all of the rigor and discipline of an academic training,

but also pushing against those boundaries

and trying to do something new and distinct and different.

The art world had changed radically in the previous decades.

First came the Impressionists, men like Monet and Degas,

who had revolutionised art by capturing fleeting moments,

scenes of daily life and reflections of modernising France.

Then the Post-Impressionists,

seeking greater emotional depth and psychological involvement.

Men like Cezanne...

Van Gogh...

and Gauguin, who focused much more on structure and colour.

For years, Matisse lived in Paris, painting, sculpting,

as well as marrying and starting to raise a family.

But trips to the South of France encouraged a greater attachment

to vivid colour and form, influenced by the bright sunlight

and deep shadows of the French Mediterranean coastline.

Matisse's greatness was as a colourist.

He achieved a perfection of colour, of design, of...

almost of composing, like a musician,

which I don't think anyone has emulated since.

I don't think one can dispute that, but he didn't develop in a vacuum.

He was, if you like,

the final stage in a revolution in colour

that started with the Impressionists

and then moved on, was advanced by Post-Impressionists.

And gradually, the function of colour

stopped being descriptive of nature and started getting the freedom

to be expressive of emotion and mood.

In 1905, Matisse and some friends held an exhibition,

and their paintings gained them a collective name, the Fauves,

The Wild Beasts.

Fauvism took Matisse on a journey even deeper into bold

and imaginative use of colour, form and balance,

and it was a journey that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

"The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive,

"the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them,

"the proportions, everything has its share.

"The expressive aspect of colours imposes itself on me

"in a purely instinctive way.

"The chief function of colour

"should be to serve expression as well as possible.

"I put down my tones without a preconceived plan."

At the outbreak of World War I,

the 44-year-old Matisse was declared too old to fight.

He stayed in Paris until 1917

and then he relocated to the Cote d'Azur.

And it was here, on the south coast of France,

that he would spend much of the rest of his life.

I think it's vital, his move to the south,

especially again having seen where he grew up, his early years.

It's the exact opposite of a Matisse painting,

it's the antithesis.

That, I found very instructive to realise

that he sought these things out, he created his life to enable him

to paint the subjects that inspired him,

which were either light, palm trees,

things which are more, sort of, exotic,

all of these things he wasn't born into,

he had to find for himself and so I think, in my reading,

that move can't really be underestimated.

Two artists dominated this period, Picasso and Matisse.

They were both rivals and friends.

Almost uniquely, he and Picasso were the two artists

who were great before the First World War

and then continued to be great after the First World War,

which for so many other artists was a total, sort of, caesura

that they couldn't go beyond,

they didn't develop at all artistically,

whereas Picasso and indeed Matisse still had the ideas,

still re-invented themselves.

What you don't get with Matisse very often, unlike Picasso,

is any great psychological insight.

It is the composition of the painting,

it is the human figure,

it's very much a part of that composition.

In his most memorable...

Almost the most memorable thing he ever painted, The Dance,

you're not particularly curious about who the figures are,

but you are totally seduced by the rhythm

of the motion of the figures and the spaces between their limbs

and their relation to each other.

In 1930, Matisse travelled to Tahiti and the USA

to find a new light and energy.

It was in the USA, too,

that the wealthy industrialist, Albert Barnes,

commissioned a huge mural, also called The Dance.

By the end of it,

Matisse was convinced his future lay in simplicity,

flattening, continued colour experimentation

and the use of something new, the paper cut-out.

In 1939, France was again at war with Germany.

Distressed at France's fall, Matisse remained here in Nice.

Early in 1941, a more personal tragedy befell him,

abdominal cancer.

The surgery to remove it left him incapacitated.

To escape the bombing,

Matisse moved a few miles inland to Vence.

And here, he slowly recuperated.

"In order to make my pictures,

"I need to remain for several days in the same state of mind

"and I do not find this in any atmosphere,

"but that of the Cote d'Azur.

"For me now, silence and isolation are useful."

As he recovered and worked,

Matisse immersed himself deeper and deeper

into the world of the cut-out.

The word that I would characterise

Matisse's work ethic with is defiance.

And the cut-outs are a very good case in point,

because really what he does,

at a moment when he's getting older,

he's ill, you know, he's not in the best health, he's quite frail,

he's in a certain amount of pain, he's suffering from insomnia.

He battles against all of these things

to produce works which seem,

apparently, to be very joyful, spontaneous, youthful,

the very, very opposite of everything that he's experiencing,

and I think there's something rather extraordinary about that.

In respect of the cut-outs.

I think he has taken a way of making art

and actually driven it as far as it would possibly go

and produced something timelessly beautiful.

Matisse does seem, in a way, to be retreating from the world...

or he's retreating from pain and grief

and suffering in the world, he's creating his own world

of great beauty, of great serenity

and great happiness and, my goodness,

there is such a need for that.

"Look at this large composition.

"The foliage, fruits, scissors, a garden.

"As I am obliged to remain often in bed,

"because of the state of my health,

"I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk.

"There are leaves, fruits, a bird.

"An artist must possess nature.

"He must identify himself with her rhythm,

"by work that prepares the mastery

"by which he will later be able to express himself

"in his own language.

"All my efforts aim towards obtaining, without brutality,

"the maximum force of colour."

The Museum Of Modern Art committed itself to Matisse very early on.

In fact, in 1932, three years after our founding,

we bought our first works by Matisse

and have continued to build our collection of his work,

now numbering 300 works

and arguably, the most important collection

of Matisse's work in the world. The tradition of looking at Matisse

across all of the different dimensions

of his practice has been essential to

the Museum Of Modern Art now for almost 90 years.

The Swimming Pool by Matisse is

the most important Matisse cut-out in art collection.

In 1992, the Museum Of Modern Art had a landmark retrospective of

the entire career of Henri Matisse.

It was during that exhibition that the then curator said

The Swimming Pool really needs to undergo conservation.

So, over the years, I've thought about it

and thought about it and then, in 2008, made a proposal

to the painting and sculpture department

to conserve The Swimming Pool.

This panel shows a swimmer,

so Matisse was recreating a pool with female swimmers

and what we have done,

as part of the conservation procedure,

is to have lined the back.

So the edge has been lined with Japanese paper to reinforce it

and then these tabs have been added.

So when we reinstall this work on solid panels,

it will be these tabs that we use

to either staple through or tack through,

so that the original tacking margin will no longer have a hole on it.

There's something extraordinary that happens

when you're in the presence of Matisse's cut-outs.

Say The Swimming Pool, one of his magisterial

and most important works, it's almost visceral,

you actually feel the work in your body,

as well as to see it through your eyes

and what we learnt during the research for this exhibition

is that he didn't paste the work, the shapes, to the surface,

he pinned them, they floated, they had a fluidity to them

that you cannot understand

unless you're physically before them.

In a work like this, I'm trying to examine for technical manufacture.

So at the moment, if you look up on the screen,

you see the yellow paper

and it looks like there are two holes,

and in fact there are two holes,

and that's evidence of the original pinning with...

From the yellow through on to the orange.

One of the mysteries, when looking at the cut-outs,

is why is it that sometimes a form is all from one piece...

..and then you'll look at another form

and it's made up of many, many, many, small pieces.

There is simply no adequate answer.

In The Swimming Pool,

you can see that there are certain swimmers

where the whole body is virtually one piece,

and then you look at others

and it's made of many, many, many layers.

What was important was the outline and the colour.

This is a full-scale mock-up of one of the nine panels.

So I painted large sheets of blue paper...

..I traced the original exactly and then I cut these shapes,

so they are an exact replica of the original panel.

And so what I'm experimenting here is the actual process of pinning.

The works were pinned to the wall,

so they had a liveliness that was reduced

when they were mounted overall,

so what I was trying to work out for myself,

both as curator and as conservator, was how would this pinning work?

I hope that you will be able to see

and what we were testing and what we're very happy with,

that the work has a three dimensionality,

it has a liveliness,

which is what we were trying to achieve in our reinstallation.

We're beginning the installation of the work,

and you have this expectation of what it's going to be like,

but actually standing in front of them is totally different.

Everyone has been assuming that the four nudes will be on one wall.

I'm pretty sure that they're going to end up on two walls,

then, how do you split them? How do you integrate the sculpture?

How do they sit in relation to each other?

How are they lit? Do you create an equal interval?

Or do you group two and then one?

I've already listed about 10 or 15 possibilities

and that's the multiplicity of decisions

that you're making all the time.

Even though you've got certain already-fixed points.

'We're in the middle of the installation.'

There is a lot happening around us.

And then this one needs to move to the left.

Number two needs to move to the left.

'The ambition always is to try

'and reveal how the artist's thinking developed.'

When you're coming into this room,

you're coming into a really tight group of work,

where you can really almost trace on an hourly basis

how his thinking was evolving.

When that comes in,

I just want to try one other crazy thing.

What do you want to do?

Put it down there and pull the sculpture here. OK.

'The four Blue Nudes and the sculptures

'is really a pivotal room in the show.

'It's the moment where Matisse'

really developed a completely free way of working.

These are not works that are made from drawing in front of the model,

they are entirely made from memory.

And you have that sense of almost a, kind of, quiver of excitement

as he makes these forms

and he refers back to his own production in sculpture.

So we now have four... Two.

Two. One. One.

Three. Three.

Swap those two.

The four Blue Nudes were all conceived

very close together in 1952 and then they were split up.

Occasionally, they've been seen together in exhibitions,

but this is really a very rare moment.

Actually, the nice thing about this now

is that one, two, three, four,

but this is actually the first one you see,

which is the first one he began, so that's great.

So we've got it.

I think I'm happy with it,

but we're about to see it go up on the wall and then we'll know.

Here we are, it's a sculptor, it's a painter,

it's an artist who is looking back over his life

and thinking about what he's made before.

Because he was really trying to work out

how to represent the body,

but also how to represent the way in which

the body holds itself and falls.

It has much more emotional depth to it, I think.

Conventionally, they are shown all four on one wall,

but we've decided to split them,

so we end up now with a very happy circumstance,

somehow they just control the space

and they, in a way, oblige you to walk around in a particular way.

It's undoubtedly one of the high points of the show.

"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.

"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 before.

"But I know that it will only be much later

"that people will realise to what extent

"the work I am doing today is in step with the future."

When I was little, we had a portrait of my father that I looked at a lot.

The line of the nose came through the corner of the eye.

And when I was growing up, you know,

you'd draw one eye here and one eye here

and the nose in the middle and the mouth like that

but this was all, kind of, like, loose.

And I always thought that was so interesting,

that this big guy could break the rules.

That certainly left me

a kind of freedom that, you know, was worth thinking about.

I always felt, like, this intensity with his work.

These were stuck onto the wall

and, in a sense, I mean, there was no boundary,

there was no frame to stop, it was limitless.

He was using colours that we associate with youth

and even really young youth, you know? Childlike.

And I think it's so beautiful that at the end of his life,

when he's in that wheelchair, or in bed,

what you see is an old man, but what you get from him

has nothing to do with his physical appearance.

It's all about expansion.

This is just, for me, a very moving piece.

I mean, first of all to see

the huge blocks of colour seem so bold.

And there's a beautiful green that I love so much.

I really love the greens.

I know everybody is like, "Matisse blue, Matisse blue,"

'and of course the blues are great,

'but I feel a relationship to the green.'

When I used to visit my grandfather in New York,

he had this hanging in his house. This was always there.

A beautiful piece.

There are some people that say, you know,

that he was a very funny man, very comical,

and loved to have a good time.

You know, you talk to somebody else in the family

and he was severe, he was criticising all the time,

so I think there was a wide range,

but, I mean, in order to do that kind of work,

and the amount of work that he did,

you know, you can't be relaxed all the time.

He never closed down,

so he just kept open and seemed to be open

and more open and more expansive throughout his life,

but especially in the last period when he was doing the cut-outs.

I think it tells us that his spirit was a free spirit.

"Suppose I want to paint a woman's body.

"First of all, I imbue it with grace and charm,

"but I know that I must give something more.

"I will condense the meaning of this body

"by seeking its essential lines.

"I don't put in eyes sometimes, or a mouth for my figures,

"but that's because the face is anonymous,

"because the expression is carried by the whole picture.

"Arms, legs, all the lines act like parts of an orchestra.

"The spectator's soul becomes involved in the maze

"of these multiple elements,

"and so his imagination is freed from all limits.

"My models, human figures,

"are never just extras in an interior.

"They are the principal theme in my work."

Matisse's studio was, at one time, a large apartment in this block,

the Hotel Regina.

And then, for a long period, it was his bedroom here in

the Villa le Reve in Vence, near Nice.

Restricted by age and illness, Matisse made this room his world.

And here, working with his assistants,

everything was channelled into the cut-outs.

He could still paint, he could still sculpt,

he simply didn't want to.

In March of '46, we went to see him

and I was very astonished when we arrived

and at the door his secretary, Lydia Delectorskaya, was there,

she took us inside and, to my utter surprise,

everything was in darkness,

so I could not expect that from the painter of colour.

And finally, we arrived in a room,

which was a little bit smaller than that big room which was in darkness.

And there, there was a bit of normal light.

And Matisse was in bed.

Because he had had a terrible surgery in 1941,

and after that, he was, most of the time, in bed.

He called that part of his life, from 1941 to 1954, when he died,

he called that, "Le sursis," which means that he was given

a bit of extra time, what he might not have had.

Because of his surgery and because he could not stand...

Well, you know, when you paint, most of the time, you are standing

and, in the case of Matisse, it was no longer possible.

So... And he also had to stay in bed the largest part of the day,

so from his bed, either he could have some papers

put on the ceiling and with a long...

Charcoal on a long rod, he would paint from his bed

into the ceiling, or he would, with very large scissors,

cut out in pure colour.

Since Picasso and myself went to see him rather often,

many times we saw him in the process of

doing one of those carvings in pure colour.

It was interesting, because when he had done one shape,

then, he had his secretary, Lydia Delectorskaya,

pin it to the wall and then he would say,

for the second piece,

"Higher, lower, to the right, or to the left."

And then again cut in a different colour,

another shape, and put it also somewhere.

So it was interesting, you could see him at work.

From 1947 to 1951,

Matisse worked on the designs for what would be, in effect,

a three-dimensional cut-out, the Chapel Of The Rosary in Vence.

Monique Bourgeois had been employed by Matisse in 1941

to help him recover from his cancer operation.

By 1947, she had become a nun, working in a nursing home

only a few minutes from the Villa le Reve.

Matisse heard of their plans to build a chapel in the grounds

and out of gratitude for her past care,

he offered to both fund and design this new chapel.

It was an enormous job

and faced opposition from within the Catholic Church,

but the result is, for many, Matisse's crowning glory.

"This Chapel is, for me, the culmination of a life of work,

"and the coming into flower of an enormous,

"sincere and difficult effort.

"From a space of bright shadow-less sunlight,

"which envelops our spirit on the left,

"we find, passing to the right, the tile walls.

"They are the visual equivalent of a large, open book

"where the white pages carry the signs

"explaining the musical part

"composed by the stained-glass windows.

"To give the idea of immensity within a very limited surface.

"That's what I did in the chapel at Vence.

"It's a convent chapel and, in spite of everything,

"it seems to me that I created the idea of vastness

"which touches the soul.

"For a very long time, I wanted to synthesise my contribution.

"Then, this opportunity came along.

"I was able, at the same time, to do architecture, stained-glass,

"large mural drawings on tile and to unite these elements,

"to fuse them into one perfect unity.

"All art worthy of the name is religious.

"Be it a creation of lines, or colours,

"if it is not religious, it doesn't exist.

"If it is not religious,

"it is only a matter of documentary art, anecdotal art,

"which is no longer art. Which has nothing to do with art.

"I want the chapel visitors to experience

"a lightening of spirit.

"So that, even without being believers,

"they sense a milieu of spiritual elevation,

"where thought is clarified, where feeling itself is lightened.

"My only religion is the love of the work to be created,

"the love of creation, and great sincerity.

"I did the Chapel with the sole intention

"of expressing myself profoundly."

Subtitles by ITV SignPost