Matisse: Invitation To The Voyage @ Fondation Beyeler
Recognised as one of the most well-known modern art pioneers, Henri Matisse’s innovative work have influenced countless artists, from his peers – working and producing in his times – to present contemporary artist producing today. Invitation To The Voyage is one of the largest Matisse retrospective exhibitions presented to the public to date and the first to be presented in Switzerland. Exhibiting over 70 of the artist’s most important works, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland presents the artist’s artistic journey from figurative canvases to abstract cut-out masterpieces.
Henri Matisse, L’intérieur à la fougère noire, 1948. Oil on canvas. 116,5 x 89,5 cm. Photo Courtesy: Fondation Beyeler.
The exhibition stems from the renowned poem “L’Invitation Au Voyage” – Invitation To The Voyage – written by French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and acts as a thread tying together the main aspects of the artist’s career. Referred to often in his works, Matisse frequently consults Baudelaire’s poems for inspiration. Therefore, the poem serves as the foundation for the exhibition, acting as a thread by connecting Matisse’s creative evolution to the title of the show. Another key aspect explored across the exhibition are the extensive travels which inspired Matisse. In fact, when considering the time, the artist travelled fa and wide covering the territories of the South Pacific, the United States, North Africa, Russia, and the most influential location to his career, the South of France. These travels, which he frequently made in quest of a fresh perspective on light and colour, greatly influenced and inspired the shifts in style reflected across his art.
Matisse: Invitation To The Voyage, 2024. Installation view. Photo Courtesy: Fondation Beyeler.
Matisse: Invitation To The Voyage, 2024. Installation view. Photo Courtesy: Fondation Beyeler.
The Beyeler Fondation is one of the most well-known private foundation and museum in Europe. Located in Basel, Switzerland, the foundation took over the iconic antiquarian bookshop on Bäumleingasse, turning it in to a commercial gallery, re-naming the business to Galerie Beyeler. Founded by art dealers and collectors, Ernst and Hildy Beyeler in 1997, the gallery and later foundation has created to house their exceptional collection of modern and contemporary art. the collection included pieces by the artists who defined the 19th and 20th century, such as Edvard Munch, Alexej von Jawlensky, Mark Rothko, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alberto Giacometti and Henri Matisse. The gallery became a foundation in 1982 and in 1997 Ernst Beyeler decided to move his collection to his hometown of Riehen, a small town outside of Basel, Switzerland. This also marked the inauguration of the building by Renzo Piano, commissioned to house the Beyeler collection. The building combines art with architecture and the surrounding environment in a natural way by leveraging the use of natural lighting and large glass windows.
The couple’s original collection – which they acquired throughout the years as gallerists –and is now displayed in a designated section of the foundation’s building, stands as a testament to their taste and conviction that outstanding art should be available to everyone. This determination and overlooking managing eye of Ernst Beyeler, brought the foundation to develop into a major centre of culture. Over the years the presentation of acclaimed artists and brilliantly curated exhibitions increased the national and international reputation of the museum, contributing to their influence in the artworld. Still growing and preserving its collection today, Fondation Beyeler is providing a dynamic blend of modern and classic pieces, forwarding an awareness of modern art among a global audience.
The Fondation Beyeler. Photo Courtesy: Art Basel.
Matisse: Invitation To The Voyage brings together multiple masterpieces – by Henri Matisse – from important American and European museums as well as private collections, demonstrating the evolution and variety of the artist’s groundbreaking body of work.
Starting with the early pieces produced at the beginning of the 1900s, the works story tell the creative evolution from the experimental works and revolutionary paintings of the 1910s and 1920s, through to the sensuous paintings realised across the “Nice period” in the 1930s, and finally to the height of Matisse’s abstraction, across the renowned cut-outs of the 1940s and 1950s. The poem Invitation To The Voyage by Charles Baudelaire, published in 1857, serves as the foundation for the show. Furthermore, the poem acts as a core theme across the rooms, as multiple leitmotifs from f Matisse’s art are found or appear in Baudelaire’s poem.
Essential to understanding the exhibition is comprehending the artist’s life, as his experiences that influenced his production greatly. French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954), renowned for having pioneered modern art across the particular use of vivid colours and flowing naturalistic forms, started his career in law until realising his love for painting in his early 1920s. Although he received his training at the esteemed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he quickly rejected conventional academic approaches, adopting avant-garde perspectives and techniques. The artist’s first rise to prominence happened early in his career, with the rise of the Fauvist movement, which promoted and consolidated the use of vivid and non-naturalistic colours. His bold use of colour and unrestricted expressiveness in pieces like Woman with a Hat and The Joy of Life – these pieces are not included in the exhibition but act as key recognisable pieces by Henri Matisse – stunned the art world. He experimented with a variety of artistic mediums during his career, from printmaking, painting and sculpture, to later in life, large-scale cut-out collages. Furthermore, the most influential artist in Matisse’s career was Pablo Picasso. He influenced the French artist’s modernism in a variety of fields, including colour theory and abstract painting. Matisse persisted in his artistic endeavours despite bouts of illness and misfortune – following surgery, prohibiting the artist from standing – Matisse even worked from bed and adopted his most famous technique, the cut-out collages. His colourful and unique approach to creativity, has made Henri Matisse a central artist of the 20th century, leaving lasting impact on art history.
As mentioned above, the display presents different periods of Matisse’s career across the multiple rooms of the museum. The curation of the exhibition was carefully thought out to portray the variety of styles and periods the artist was able to adapt to and adopt across his practice. Matisse’s artistic style evolve across his career towards an absolute abstraction. However, before the cut-out phase, Matisse mirror four other artistic currents, impressionism, pointillism, fauvism and cubism. Along with these currents the artist was also influence by their main figure, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, André Derain and Pablo Picasso.
Moreover, all these “periods” adopted by Matisse are represented across the exhibition.
Henri Matisse, La fenêtre ouverte (The open window), 1905. Oil on canvas. 55,3 x 46 cm. Photo Courtesy: National Gallery of Art Washington DC.
This painting marked the beginning of a relationship between Matisse and the south of France as a source of inspiration. In 1905 the artist spent his first summer in the fishing resort of Collioure, in the Pyrenees region of southern France, with his family and fellow artist André Derain. The two worked within close influence of each other and Matisse started to integrate more colour into his palette, as Derain practiced in the fauvist movement. As per this artwork, most of the canvases created in this period were small-format artworks. The creative revolution that liberated colour from its traditional, representational role is widely believed to have begun during this period. This movement, later established as “Fauvism” emerged when avant-garde artists, later led by Henri Matisse, were labelled as “fauves” – in English “wild beasts” – by critics for their bold, untamed use of colour.
In this painting, Matisse abandons conventional techniques, opting for an unblended colour palette and seemingly random brushstrokes. His goal is to achieve maximum colour intensity, discarding traditional light-and-shadow effects, depth and volume. Moreover, the canvas is divided into striking and contrasting sections of colour, arranged differently depending on the direction and placement of each brushstroke. The image of the open window, a recurring motif in Matisse’s work, serves as both a symbolic portal to the outside world and as an “invitation to the voyage” – connecting the artwork to the exhibition title – inviting viewers to explore new imaginative realms whilst enjoying the artist’s displayed retrospective.
Henri Matisse, Le Luxe I, 1907. Oil on canvas. Photo Courtesy: Centre Pompidou Paris.
In the summer of 1907, Matisse travelled through Italy with his wife, immersing himself in the late medieval frescoes of the Italian painter Giotto. This journey profoundly impacted his artistic direction. Matisse then completed Le Luxe I – in English it can be defined as “Richness” – a painting that hinted at his growing interest in large-scale works and a shift toward a monumental style reminiscent of frescoes.
This marked a distinct departure from his earlier Fauvist pieces, as Matisse developed an entirely new pictorial approach. The painting’s subject remains enigmatic and is not defined by the title. The title, Luxe, calme et volupté, echoes the refrain of Baudelaire’s poem Invitation to the Voyage, reinforcing the mysterious, dreamlike quality of the work. Drawing inspiration from a vast array of artistic traditions, including the Renaissance and Japanese woodcuts, Matisse reimagines these three female figures, through the lens of Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, creating a pointillism through the brushstroke and crafting a vision that transcends conventional Western ideals of beauty.
Henri Matisse, Poisson rouges et palette (Goldfish and palette), 1915. Oil on canvas. Photo Courtesy: The Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA).
Furthermore, Matisse’s artistic career evolves, adopting characteristics of the artists working around him in the same period. This painting was created during a highly experimental phase for Matisse, as the influence of Cubism becomes evident in the flatness of the composition and the use of multiple perspectives. His technique also reflects this spirit of experimentation, as he layered, scratched and scraped the surface of the canvas, emphasizing hatching and light reflections. The looming shadow of World War I likely influenced this painting, as well as this moment in the artist’s production, with the previous use of bold colours, his palette darkened in response to a world where established orders were beginning to break down. This painting features large fields of blue-grey, black and white, with sharply fragmented lines highlighting the subdued tones of the work. However, a brightly coloured still life stands out, where the curved shapes of the fruit, plant, and goldfish echo the scrolls of the balcony railing and allude to a sense of hope.
Henri Matisse, Grand nu couché / Nu rose (Large reclining nude / The pink nude), 1935. Oil on canvas. Photo Courtesy: Fondation Beyeler.
Shifting back to a use of colour, Matisse starts to incorporate more figures into his works, analysing and simplifying their forms to a minimalist approach. In this artwork, the large nude female figure stretches beyond the canvas’s edges in a striking display of bright tones. The pinkish-orange body contrasts vividly against the blue and white checkered bench. The background features a red ledge, white tiles with green grout and a mysterious yellow shape, adding to the vibrant, layered composition. One of the most noticeable aspects is the stark disproportion between the woman’s small head and her elongated limbs. Her skin is painted in flat, unblended strokes, with only the curving black outline of her body creating a sense of volume. Matisse worked on this painting for several weeks and over the course of 26 different iterations of the same subject. Across this study he reduced the figure to a seemingly collaged cut-out piece placed into the canvas. This technique hints at Matisse’s later development of the famous paper cut-outs.
Henri Matisse, Nu bleu aux bas verts (Blue nude with green stockings), 1952. Gouache on canson paper cut and pasted on vellum paper mounted on canvas. 258 x 167cm. Photo Courtesy: Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Finally the last chosen work to delve into the artist’s artistic journey toward abstraction is the emblematic use of collage. In this piece the nude woman floats within her space, surrounded by two seaweed-like plants. Her legs, painted green, appear to take on a life of their own, while her blue and magenta-toned body remains intertwined with the naturalistic forms. This piece merges two of Matisse’s most iconic cut-out motifs, the blue female nude and the unique shapes of plants.
Unlike the richly detailed spatial compositions of his paintings, this life-size artwork is striking in its minimalism. The bold contours of the cut paper shapes are the only elements that animate the otherwise empty space, directing the viewer’s focus to the figure. Matisse compared the act of cutting paper to sculpting, referring to it as “scissor drawing”, as a sculptor carves directly into the stone, Matisse “cut directly into coloured paper” merging the disciplines of sculpture, painting and drawing. In these papiers découpés, he eliminates the traditional distinctions between figure and decoration, or foreground and background, creating fluid forms that transform and evolve within the space.
Matisse’s journey from figurativeness to bright colour, dynamic brushstrokes and mysterious subject matters, led him to develop a unique minimalistic approach to scenery and human figures. The journey towards abstraction becomes more evident across the paintings present within the Fondation Beyeler’s display, as the cut-outs are placed in the last room. Finally, the collaboration between esteemed private collections, American and European museums, illustrate the evolution and breadth of the artist’s groundbreaking body of work circulating the art world.
Matisse’s retrospective, Invitation To The Voyage, is on display at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland until 26 January 2025.
Grace Jamieson Bianciardi
Reviews Editor, MADE IN BED