Matisse: Works to Know by Heart @ Tate Liverpool

As the physical effects of age take hold, an artist’s work must necessarily shift and change accordingly. In 1914, at the age of 72, Henri Matisse underwent cancer surgery and was forced to spend the majority of his time in a wheelchair or confined to his bed. Primarily a painter and sculptor, he began to make collages or ‘cut-outs,’ directing his assistants in the assemblage of often large-scale works. Matisse cut and tore the paper and had his assistants arrange the pieces on the wall or floor before being stuck down. His works from this renaissance period beam with colour and abstract natural forms.

One of these, The Snail (1953), is the largest of Matisse’s cut-outs and the focal point for the current exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Measuring three square metres, The Snail was completed just a year before the artist’s death. Red, blue, green and yellow squares tumble around inside the orange lozenge-coloured border. Yes, it is the snail, but it is also flags waving or a washing line, or feast-day dancers forming a circle.

Due to the radically different style and colour palatte of The Snail, the Tate exhibition is split into two loose kinds of exhibition agenda. The first is to highlight the fact that, due to its delicate state, The Snail probably won’t be shown again outside London. In 2014/15 it was included in the blockbuster Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern and MoMA, New York. This is definitely the farewell tour and an important moment when a key part of the Matisse narrative will be missing from future international exhibitions.

The second strand is to highlight the development of style and subject matter in Matisse’s work, especially in his depiction of ‘the figure’ as he moved through his career and on to his cut-out work. Eighty other Matisse works in painting, drawing and sculpture dating from 1899 are on view, many from the Tate’s own collection. This includes early works, such as the Impressionist colouring of the portrait of André Derain (1905), and on to Gauguin tropicality in Trivaux Pond (1916/17) and Bloomsbury-powdered The Inattentive Reader (1919).

Positioned in front of The Snail is small sculpture Reclining Nude II (1927). The figure’s languid position is that of the odalisque, or eroticised female, stemming from the Turkish word for chambermaid and later coming to mean harem concubine. Her body is stretched out with a pose designed to showcase every asset, a pose much used by Matisse. We see it elsewhere in the same gallery, sometimes actually reflected in the surface of The Snail’s frame, with Draped Nude (1936), in which the woman lounges in a lilac dressing gown. It is worth noticing that the shape of the main torso seems to be the most important; here the dark lines of her body are accentuated, whereas the hands are mere sketches, half thoughts. Her feet are out of the picture completely. This is true of much of Matisse’s portraiture and still life and suggests a central focus on lines of the trunk or vessel; the way a body can shift, display or contort. Looking back at The Snail, this is echoed in the curl or spiral of the mollusc.