Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Fifty paintings, a dozen sculptures, as many gouache cut-outs: the Beyeler Fondation’s stunning new exhibition Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage shows a fraction of the artist’s output, but the haul, spanning his entire career, is so stellar and intently selected that it’s hard to conceive of a richer or more joyous retrospective.Maurice Denis compared seeing a Matisse painting to “the vertigo that a white wall or esplanade cause at high noon in the summer”, and so it feels throughout the Beyeler’s glassy, light-drenched galleries: from the moment “Luxe, Calme et Volupté”, the refulgent Saint-Tropez fantasy which launched Fauvism in 1904, casts its dazzle over the opening room, to the final luminous acrobatic figures carved from paper, the 1952 “Blue Nudes”.Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au Voyage”, dreaming of a lovers’ paradise as a series of sensations, gives the exhibition its title. Matisse named “Luxe” for Baudelaire’s refrain, “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme et volupté” (“There — nothing but order and beauty dwell, Abundance, calm, and sensuous delight”). The painting transposes figures modelled on Cézanne’s bathers to an enchanted land conjured in pink, orange, gold dabs and dashes, intensifying and making artificial the Mediterranean’s blinding light and colour.“Luxe” introduced the tension between imagination and reality that underlies Matisse’s art: Baudelairean sensuality, transporting us to exotic or interior realms, balanced by rigour of observation, form, composition. The exhibition pivots around that idea.Its poster image is the 1935 picture of rapture held in equilibrium with structure “Large Reclining Nude”, the heavily stylised figure set on a geometric tiled ground. It hangs with its arabesque twin, “The Large Blue Robe and Mimosas”, where a Velázquez-like costume is echoed in an extravagantly curving chair. Both are precious loans from the US.Broadly chronological, the show has a heady selection of pre-1914 works where audacious abstracting experiments alternate with traditional genres subverted. The huge primeval giants gathering on a flattened shore in “Bathers with a Turtle”, its lumpen, crude yet intimately engrossed figures, still baffles. In “Still Life with Oranges”, the tilting pink cube-table and opulent patterning hypnotically disorientate us; this key still life comes from Paris’s Musée Picasso — Matisse wept with delight on hearing his rival had bought it.Several of Baudelaire’s seductions in “L’Invitation” find direct visual expression in early Matisse, attesting to his symbolist connections. “Carpets of oriental splendour” cascade in “The Red Rugs”. “Rarest of flowers” are celebrated in the dusky pink-blue “Acanthus (Moroccan Landscape)”, depicted after a storm in Tangier — the first time Matisse encountered this plant. The flowers were later reconceived, reduced to essential forms and massively enlarged, in the three-metre-wide cut-out “Acanthuses”, owned by the Beyeler.From “The Open Window” (1905) ripples Baudelaire’s “fleet of ships floating sleepily in the harbour . . . ready to sail to the ends of the earth” — a picture alert with movement of air, water, plants fizzing in staccato touches: life full of promise. Washington’s loan of this iconic painting enables comparison with the Pompidou’s wartime “French Window at Collioure” (1914), austere vertical bands of shutters and frames staring into a black void: life shut down.The darting bright trio of large “Goldfish” paintings (1912-15), the aquarium a metaphor for the studio and for contemplation, reunited from MoMA and the Pompidou, appear at this midpoint. Continuing the window motif, they are Matisse’s exhilarated responses to Cubism’s dissected space. In “Interior with a Goldfish Bowl”, a plant beside the bowl rises through the window to curve over the bridge across the Seine outside. In “Goldfish and Palette” Matisse includes an oblique self-portrait — his thumb holding a palette, balanced on his knees. “I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermilion goldfish,” he joked; really these paintings record how “a will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colours and forms”.The open window, metaphor for painting, its framing of reality, is co-opted into Matisse’s hedonistic search for “beauty and order” after the war. In “Large Interior, Nice”, a continuum of clear, silvery light streams from the sea across the balcony and into a room in the rococo-style Hotel Mediterranée, which he loved as “fake, absurd, amazing, delicious”. Games of spatial depth versus decorative surface peak in the late 1940s window compositions made in Nice just before he abandoned easel painting for the cut-outs. “Interior with an Egyptian Curtain” depicts an explosive palm outside a window, framed by a Middle Eastern curtain whose appliqué free forms inspired the papiers découpés. He is still seeking “that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture” in the symphonic, zigzagging, flattened “Red Interior” uniting inside and outside by all-over colour — revisiting Fauvism.In recent years, important European exhibitions have explored diverse aspects of Matisse — from Tate’s “Cut-Outs” to Fondation Vuitton’s “The Red Studio” this summer — but the Beyeler is the first in decades to consider his work as a whole. It is particularly rewarding because Matisse is both a linear artist, evolving from Impressionist antecedents to the brink of abstraction, and a cyclical one, endlessly retracing his steps, and in multiple media.Like Picasso, he experimented in sculpture when painting was stalling, and sculptures punctuate the Beyeler’s gracious, airy display. The monumental “Back” nude reliefs, developing from relatively naturalistic to the columnar “The Back IV”, hang alongside the painting of a grand sculptural nude “Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground”. “The Serpentine” (1909), the sinuous, elongated bronze figure with crossed legs, seen early in the exhibition, is recalled in the abbreviated cut-out “Blue Nudes” in the final room.“Blue Nude l” was the first Matisse that dealer-collector Ernst Beyeler bought, in 1960, from the artist’s daughter. Many Matisses then passed through his hands, en route to museums. He kept offbeat favourites: the mysterious “Interior with Black Fern”, a voluminous, spreading dark plant and a woman in a white dress so transparent that a table leg spikes straight through it; “The Artist’s Garden at Issy”, geometric, overlapping discs of water lily pads above a silted-up pool. It was painted in 1917 after Matisse visited Monet’s pond in Giverny — acknowledging debts to, and departure from, Impressionism.Invitation to the Voyage closes with Matisse making, as Monet did, his own garden — the luxuriant profuse cut-outs “White Alga on Red and Green Background”, “Four-Petal Flower”, “Acanthuses”. Like Monet, Matisse is one of the irrepressible pleasure givers of French secular tradition, driven as his biographer Jack Flam says by “a profound sense of the meaninglessness of life coupled with a nearly religious passion to praise the whole of existence”. What a journey this show is, traversing Paris, Collioure, the Côte d’Azur, Morocco, and returning always to the battles in the studio where Matisse creates his own world.September 22-January 26, fondationbeyeler.chFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
