Art: The Sultan and the Scissors

A dazzling show of Matisse cut-outs

Young prodigies in art are as common as seagulls; the rarities are old. A special aura clings to the late works of old men who can sum up a lifetime's deposit of knowledge in a final burst of invention. One thinks of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, of Titian at 90 or Bernini at 75; or, in our century, of Henri Matisse, who died in 1954 at the age of 85. The last two decades of his life were increasingly spent on making works in paper. Ensconced in the south of France, first at Nice and later in the town of Vence, the aged sultan of the Mediterranean had his assistants cover sheets of paper with flat, brilliantly hued gouache. He then cut out shapes with scissors, and had these bright silhouettes pasted on a flat paper support. These he called his découpages—"cutouts." "Cutting into color," Matisse memorably observed in 1947, "reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor."

Vast in scale (though not always in size), lush and rigorous in color, his cutouts are among the most admired and influential works of Matisse's entire career. They belong with the grandest affirmations of the élan vital in Western art. Dr. Johnson once remarked that the prospect of being hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind. In 1941, when he was 71, Matisse nearly died of an intestinal blockage and was bedridden for much of his remaining time. But he felt reborn, and the cut-outs would serve as most eloquent witnesses to an old man's new life.

Last week a show of this late Matisse work opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Later it will travel to Detroit and St. Louis. Organized by four art historians—Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade and John Hallmark Neff—it is a brilliant start to the art season. This is not the definitive exhibition of Matisse's cutouts; it includes 58 works, about a quarter of the known total. But if it does not exhaust Matisse's achievement as découpeur, it offers an unstinted sense of buoyancy. Matisse liked to talk about the "beneficent radiation" of his color, of its power to heal, and he would prop up his paintings, like sun lamps, around the bed of a sick friend. In the National Gallery, in the sublime, undulating leaf patterns in green, blue and yellow that Matisse designed for the stained-glass windows of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, this radiation is almost enough to give the viewer a tan.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Matisse's death, but the audacity of his color remains astonishing. What other artist could handle those deep, resonant cobalt blues, those fuchsias and oranges, those velvety blacks and soprano yellows, without producing an effect akin to colored gumballs? In Matisse's world, color was equated with feeling. It belonged to the realm of Dionysus. But Matisse's goal was, in his own words, to establish "a sort of hierarchy of all my sensations," to possess and minutely articulate the nuances of feeling. There was nothing more decisive than the actual process of cutting, the shears slicing through the painted paper, dividing the final form from its surplus without ambiguity.