Matisse Méditerranée(s)
Auteur(s) : Aymeric Jeudy (dir.)
Exhibition at the Musée Matisse, Nice, 7 May - 08 September 2025
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was continually fascinated by the Mediterranean, from his first visit to Corsica in 1898 to his uninterrupted visits to Nice between 1917 and 1954, including numerous journeys to Algeria, Spain, Italy and Morocco. The painter himself admitted that the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that amazed him, was a determining factor in his work, both in terms of the experimentation with a new language that this environment enabled him to develop and in terms of the pictorial tradition to which he was attached; even more so, in terms of the mediation it offered him with the East and ancient cultures. Indeed, Matisse, who sought to express his personal perception of landscape, had a conceptual relationship with the sea, and with the Mediterranean in particular: for the painter, it became the site of intense chromatic and plastic research, the discovery of new motifs.
This exhibition catalogue sets out to reconsider Matisse's work through the prism of the Mediterranean and the emblematic places associated with it. Through a variety of works, including several paintings rarely shown in France, it traces the ties, rituals and idioms associated with this area of civilisation and Matisse's relationship with it.
