Centre Pompidou Brings Matisse’s Late-Period Breakthrough to the Grand Palais
Henri Matisse nearly didn’t live to make the work that now defines his final act. In early 1941, the French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954) underwent an emergency operation for a stomach tumor and, while recovering at Lyon’s Clinique du Parc, was nicknamed “Le ressuscité” by the nuns caring for him — the man who came back from the dead.
He reportedly asked his doctors for three more years. He was given 13, and those years yielded one of the most concentrated late periods in 20th-century art.
This spring, the Centre Pompidou is staging a major survey of that late production at the Grand Palais in Paris, assembling around 300 works that trace Matisse’s reinvention across the 1940s and into the early 1950s. The exhibition culminates with the cut-paper collages — the vividly colored “cut-outs” that became his final, unmistakable language — presented as the closing flourish of a seven-decade career.
The show’s scope extends well beyond the cut-outs. Visitors will encounter maquettes and pochoir prints for “Jazz” (1943–47), the artist’s landmark book project whose bold silhouettes and saturated color helped propel the cut-paper method into sustained practice. Also included are the improvisatory drawings from the “Themes and Variations” sequence (1941–43), a body of work that captures Matisse thinking on paper with unusual speed and openness.
Paintings from the later 1940s anchor the exhibition’s middle chapters: the large interiors and figure compositions made in Vence between 1946 and 1948, alongside the brush-and-ink works that accompanied them. The survey also addresses Matisse’s deepening engagement with sacred space through drawings and window designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, completed in 1951 — a project the artist himself regarded as his greatest achievement.
Why mount such an expansive account now? Claudine Grammont, the exhibition’s curator, argues that Matisse’s last period remains insufficiently familiar in the French capital. She notes that the widely seen 2014–15 exhibition of the cut-outs — presented at Tate Modern in London and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York — never traveled to Paris. For Grammont, the new project is both a corrective and an attempt to be more comprehensive, situating the cut-outs within the full range of late work rather than treating them as an isolated finale.
The timing also allows the museum to connect Matisse’s late production to the history of French collecting. Grammont points to the 1940s and immediate postwar years as a moment when the French state began acquiring works more actively, and when Matisse came to be seen as a symbol of liberty and a return to liberty at the end of World War II.
At the heart of the exhibition is a question that has long fascinated scholars and curators: what happens in an artist’s late period, when time feels both compressed and newly precious? Grammont describes Matisse’s post-surgery years as marked by urgency — a sense that “every minute was a minute to create.” Yet the show also pushes against the persistent myth of effortless pleasure that clings to Matisse’s art.
Because his palette is abundant and his forms can appear disarmingly simple, viewers often read ease where there was strain. Matisse himself famously spoke of wanting art to offer the “calming influence” of “a good armchair,” a line that has sometimes flattened the complexity of his ambition. Grammont emphasizes the opposite: that the transcendence of the late work was forged through anxiety, physical limitation, and sustained effort.
She also points to a specifically French perception that can narrow Matisse’s reputation: the tendency to treat him primarily as the painter of odalisques, especially those made in Nice in the 1920s. The late period, by contrast, reveals an artist who embraced difficulty. In her catalogue essay, Grammont cites Matisse comparing himself to a pianist practicing scales or an acrobat repeating exercises, concluding simply: “I enjoy difficulty.”
One of the exhibition’s aims is to evoke the fecund atmosphere of Matisse’s studio as the cut-outs took over his working life. Grammont describes a symbiosis between space and artwork — “the studio is the work, the work is the studio” — as colored shapes multiplied, overlapped, and spread across walls and floor, turning the room into an immersive field of composition.
By bringing together paintings, drawings, prints, maquettes, and the late cut-paper works, the Grand Palais presentation reframes Matisse’s final years not as a gentle coda, but as a period of radical invention — made possible, paradoxically, by the narrow margin between survival and loss.
