Matisse ‘Cut Outs’ Extended Plus a Nationwide Film Screening

Fans of Matisse have two reasons to celebrate:  The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has extended the blockbuster exhibition "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs", added late-night weekend hours and all-nighters during the show's final weekend on February 6 to 8. In addition, a one-night-only film screening in movie theaters will give people across the country an insider's view of the exhibition and a personal look at Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954).

Matisse from MoMA and Tate Modern will screen on Tuesday (January 13) at 7 p.m. at theaters in the United States. On Long Island, screenings take at Island 16 Cinema De Lux in Holtsville and at theaters in Stony Brook, Farmingdale and Westbury. There are four theaters in New York City that are showing the film. Click here for the full nationwide list. A trailer for the documentary can be found by clicking here.

"Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" began at the Tate Modern in London and has been touted as the most successful exhibition in the history of the London-museum. It then traveled to MoMA where it opened on October 12, 2014. The show has just been extended through February 10, 2015. The exhibit explores the final chapter in Matisse’s career when he first began 'carving into colour’ and his series of cut-outs was born, according to the museum.

The film features rare archival footage of the artist at work, interviews with his friends and with Tate director Nicholas Serota and MoMA director Glenn Lowry. This week's film screening also includes exclusive new footage from MoMA exhibition. The film also includes new performances by Royal Ballet principal dancer Zenaida Yanowsky and jazz musician Courtney Pine which “reflect the color, the freedom and the innovation of Matisse’s work,” according to the museum.

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In the late 1940s, Henri Matisse turned almost exclusively to cut paper as his primary medium, and scissors as his chief implement, introducing a radically new operation that came to be called a cut-out, according to MoMA. Matisse would cut painted sheets into forms of varying shapes and sizes—from the vegetal to the abstract—which he then arranged into lively compositions, striking for their play with color and contrast, their exploitation of decorative strategies, and their economy of means. Initially, these compositions were of modest size but, over time, their scale grew along with Matisse’s ambitions for them, expanding into mural or room-size works. A brilliant final chapter in Matisse’s long career, the cut-outs reflect both a renewed commitment to form and color and an inventiveness directed to the status of the work of art, whether as a unique object, environment, ornament, or a hybrid of all of these.

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Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs is a groundbreaking reassessment of this important body of work. The largest and most extensive presentation of the cut-outs ever mounted, the exhibition includes approximately 100 cut-outs—borrowed from public and private collections around the globe—along with a selection of related drawings, prints, illustrated books, stained glass, and textiles. The last time New York audiences were treated to an in-depth look at the cut-outs was in 1961.

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This exhibition was sparked by an initiative to conserve MoMA's monumental cut-out The Swimming Pool (1952), a favorite of visitors since its acquisition by MoMA in 1975. The Swimming Pool is the only cut-out composed for a specific room—the artist’s dining room in his apartment in Nice, France. The goals of the multi-year conservation effort have been to bring this magical environment back to its original color balance, height, and spatial configuration, according to the museum. Newly conserved, The Swimming Pool—off view for more than 20 years—returns to MoMA’s galleries as a centerpiece of the exhibition.

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Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs offers a serious reconsideration of the cut-outs by exploring a host of technical and conceptual issues: the artist’s methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice; their environmental aspects; their sculptural and temporal presence as their painted surfaces exhibited texture and materiality, curled off the walls, and shifted in position over time; and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and, ultimately, as permanent, a transformation accomplished via mounting and framing, according to MoMA. The exhibition also mines the tensions that lurk in all the cut-outs, between finish and process, fine art and decoration, drawing and color.

"Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" is organized by The Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Tate Modern, London. At MoMA, the show was organized by Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator, and Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator, with Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a children’s book.

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