Mediterranean Matisse(S)
“As important it is the Mediterranean. I who did not know her, who is a man of the North, it was the Mediterranean that struck me the most"
Henri Matisse at Pierre Courthion1
The Mediterranean exercised on Matisse a continuous fascination of its first visit to Corsica in 1898 to its uninterrupted attendance of Nice between 1917 and 1954, passing through numerous trips to discover Algeria, Spain, Italy and, of course, Morocco.
From the very admission of Matisse, the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that marvels it, is decisive for its work, both in the experimentation of a new language that this environment allows it to develop, as in the pictorial tradition to which it connects; much more, in his mediation with the East and ancient cultures.
Matisse, who seeks to express his personal perception of the landscape, maintains a conceptual relationship with the sea and the Mediterranean in particular: a sea made up of lived, sensitive, dreamed or fantasy spaces. This « machine to make civilization2As Paul Valéry (the first director of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, created in Nice in 1933), becomes, for the painter, the place of intense chromatic and plastic research, that of the discovery of new motifs.
It is above all, behind the evidences and common places, "a very old crossroads" of which Matisse was a witness and an actor, where – according to the terms of Fernand Braudel – "everything confluenced (...) men, beasts of charge, cars, goods, ships, ideas, religions, arts of living3"
The exhibition thus aims to reconsider Matisse’s work at the prism of the Mediterranean and the iconic places associated with it. It traces through various works, including several paintings never presented in Nice, the attachments, rituals, idioms related to this civilizational area and the relationship Matisse had with it.
The exhibition will gather works from exceptional loans, rarely shown in France (MOMA – USA, St Louis Muséum of Arts – United States and National Museum of Modern Art – Paris).
1COURTHION, Pierre,Bavardages: uneven interviews (2013),
Serge Guilbaut (dir.), Paris, Skira, 2017.
2VALERY, Paul, extract from theUniversal journalAugust 1, 1925.
3BRAUDEL, Fernand,The Mediterranean, t. II: Men and inheritance, Paris, Flammarion, 1986.
Photo:Henri Matisse, La Vague, Nice, ca. 1952 Depached, assembled and marouflaged paper on canvas, 51,5 × 160 cm, donation of Matisse Heritage, 1963, Musée Matisse Nice © Succession H. Matisse Find Photo © François Fernandez
Exhibition
Du wednesday 7 may 2025 au sunday 7 september 2025
Matisse Museum
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Everyone