Grand Palais Opens a Monumental Matisse Exhibition Focused on the Artist’s Final 13 Years
Paris is leaning into late Matisse. This week, the Grand Palais unveiled a sweeping exhibition devoted to the last 13 years of Henri Matisse’s life, bringing together the works he made between 1941 and 1954 — a period marked by physical fragility and an astonishing late surge of invention.
Conceived by the Centre Pompidou, the show, titled “Matisse 1941-1954,” traces how the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) retooled his practice in the face of illness and limited mobility, arriving at a language of color and form that remains among the most influential of the 20th century. The exhibition runs at the Grand Palais in Paris through July 26.
At its core are abundant examples of Matisse’s celebrated gouache cut-outs, the radical technique he developed in the 1940s and early 1950s by painting sheets of paper with gouache, cutting them into shapes, and composing them into buoyant, often monumental arrangements. The cut-outs are presented alongside a wide range of late works, including paintings, drawings, and illustrated books, offering a fuller picture of an artist who, in his final years, treated the studio as a site of continuous reinvention.
The exhibition also foregrounds Matisse’s work for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, the luminous, all-encompassing project that absorbed him in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Long understood as one of his most personal undertakings, the chapel commissions reveal how his late style moved fluidly between intimate line and architectural scale, between devotional purpose and modernist clarity.
“Matisse 1941-1954” arrives as institutions across Europe and the US continue to reassess the artist’s late period, when the cut-out became not a footnote but a culminating method — a way to “draw with scissors,” as Matisse famously described it, and to build images through direct, tactile decisions. By placing the cut-outs in dialogue with his final paintings, drawings, and book projects, the Grand Palais presentation emphasizes the breadth of his late production rather than treating any single medium as the endpoint.
The show was conceived by the Centre Pompidou and is curated by Claudine Grammont, a curator at the Centre Pompidou.
“Matisse 1941-1954” is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, until July 26.
