The Last Matisse: Morphology of Freedom
There is a moment in the lives of some artists when limits cease to be boundaries and become language.
This transition gave rise to “The Last Matisse – Morphology of Paper”, an exhibition running from February 28 to June 28 at the Historical Museum of the Infantry in Rome.
A journey through more than 100 works, divided into four sections, dedicated to the most unexpected period of Henri Matisse’s career: that of his second youth.
The exhibition, produced by Navigare Srl and curated by Vittoria Mainoldi, focuses on the final and most intense production of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), a period of dazzling creativity in which the artist, despite his physical frailty, managed to “draw in color,” revolutionizing the codes of visual representation.
The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections that trace this expressive metamorphosis of the master, starting in the 1940s, after his departure from the Fauvist avant-garde of the early 20th century and subsequent artistic experiences.
This was not a twilight phase, but a surprisingly fertile one.
Not a conclusion, but a synthesis.
When the body stops, the imagination expands
Forced by serious illness to reduced mobility, Matisse makes one of the most radical gestures in art history:
he abandons the paintbrush.
In its place, he takes up scissors.
Thus is born the “drawing with scissors”: colored paper cut out, recomposed, reinvented in space.
It was not a renunciation of painting—it was its metamorphosis.
The famous papiers découpés transformed color into mobile matter.
The surface became dynamic.
The composition ceased to be static.
This intuition also gave rise to the language of cut-outs, compositions of fragments that, photographed in sequence, suggest the illusion of movement. A painting that no longer limits itself to representing life, but seems to want to breathe it.
In these difficult years, a silent presence remains by his side: one of his models, who will later choose religious life, helping him cut out papers during his illness — an intimate collaboration that becomes part of the creative process itself.
The encounter that changed everything
The defining moment of this period was his encounter with the Greek-French publisher Tériade.
A key figure in the promotion of modern art, Tériade began a collaboration with Matisse that was destined to leave a lasting mark on 20th-century graphic design.
Together they worked on artist’s books for the magazine Verve, inaugurating a new idea of dialogue between art and print.
The first section of the exhibition opens with 24 drawings on tissue paper, testimony to this partnership and a creative method that would redefine the visual language of the century.
Art, war, modernity
These are the years of World War II.
The years when magazines become a forum for cultural debate and writers such as Ernest Hemingway cross the boundary between journalism and literature, helping to shape the imagination of an era.
In this context, Matisse’s works — including:
- La Gerbe
- La Négresse
- La Tristesse du Roi
— emerge as manifestations of a new vitality.
His interest in the exotic, his attention to other cultures, his technical freedom, and the intellectual relationships cultivated in his maturity make this last period not an epilogue, but an opening.
More revolutionary than the first
The late Matisse is not a phase of retreat.
It is a reinvention.
A language that arises from fragility and transforms into pure form.
A season that demonstrates how art, when it is authentic, does not age — but evolves.
And perhaps, precisely for this reason, it is even more daring today than it was at its inception.
In Matisse’s last gesture, there is no renunciation, but conquest: proof that art does not belong to the time of the body, but to the freedom of the gaze.
