Why the Matisse Puzzle?

A couple of years ago I was visiting my son in Valbonne in the South of France. I spent a couple of days in Nice and went to Cimiez - the upmarket suburb where Matisse lived his last years, invented the famous ‘cut outs’, and died in 1954.

Cimiez has a fascinating history with the remains of a Roman ampitheatre and thermae, as well as a17th century Franciscan monastery.

Musée Matisse in Cimiez

The Olive Grove

La Regina

View of Nice

The Matisse Musee is in the Villa des Arenes, a fantastic villa set in an olive grove park which he used to regularly promenade in.  It houses a very particular selection of his works. Opposite it is the cemetery where Matisse is buried. To the left of that is the La Regina palace hotel where Matisse rented an apartment suite with a view over the city. I stood and looked at the same view and sunlight that Matisse lived with. I gazed at the bright terracotta roofs of Nice and the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean.

Out of all the quite different exhibits in the museum I was particularly struck by the extraordinary huge hessian sheets filling two rooms which featured crude cut outs of Polynesian objects from the sea and sky- including jellyfish, seaweeds, fish, seagulls, sharks, and corals.

Tahiti and the cut outs

Matisse spent three months in Tahiti in 1930 in search of fresh inspiration from tropical light and colour, following the path blazed by Gauguin. But there are puzzles. Why was Matisse not inspired to paint a series of Tahitian scenes in oils? Why was he so fascinated by the experience of looking underwater? What was the link between his lagoon snorkeling and his revolutionary cut-outs which date from the 1940’s and are about to enthrall Londoners at the forthcoming Tate Modern Exhibition in London next month?

Matisse wrote in his Tahiti diaries:

“I bathed in the lagoon, I swam around the colours of the corals, set off by the piquant black tones of the holothurians (sea cucumbers).I plunged my head into the transparent water in the absinthe depths of the lagoon, my eyes wide open, and then I jerked my head up out of the water and gazed at the shining totality’

(in André Verdet, Préstiges de Matisse, Paris, Editions Emile Paul 1952)

Henri Matisse, Polynesian Sea

I started chatting to an eccentric in the Museum – a Matisse nut I, would call him. He was dressed in a Matisse-style striped wide lapel suit from the 1940’s, complete with waistcoat. He even had a grey goatee beard. He was obsessed by the Polynesian connection and whispered to me had I heard the rumours of the existence of a secret masterpiece.