Radical Joy: Matisse. 1941–1954 at the Grand Palais

In an art world that prizes youth — especially early breakthrough — Matisse’s final years stand as a powerful counterpoint, marking one of the most radical reinventions of his career, forged through constraint and reduction, and ultimately defined by joy. A new exhibition, Matisse. 1941–1954, on view at the Grand Palais in Paris through July 26, mounts an expansive selection of the artist’s cutouts made in the last chapter of his career. The show lands within a wider institutional focus on Matisse in 2026, from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color to a trio of exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, with additional presentations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Amsterdam’s H’ART Museum later this year.

Rather than revisiting earlier approaches, Matisse. 1941–1954 highlights the artist’s invention of a new genre of artmaking — one that would become among his most recognizable. Matisse’s brightly colored cutouts, imbued with radiance and organic form, transform this late reinvention into a new visual language that would continue to shape the trajectory of 20th-century art. The exhibition reminds us that artistic breakthrough does not always arrive instantaneously. It can emerge from a lifetime of making, culminating in a point of arrival.

The Grand Palais show brings together over 300 works spanning painting, drawing, books, and cut-out gouaches made between 1941 and 1954. In 1941, Matisse underwent surgery for intestinal cancer, and, from then until his death in 1954, he was largely relegated to a wheelchair or bed. The disease impaired his ability to stand and paint. Out of constriction, however, sometimes the most creative artistic breakthroughs are born. This was certainly true for Matisse: his physical limitations led him to seek alternative ways of artmaking. He needed something he could do while seated and began cutting pieces of paper into collage.

When a practice begins to feel stuck or stale, artists often return to their roots — a move that can unloose creative freedom. Matisse did this with his Thèmes et variations (1941–42), finding a harmonious, tranquil sequence built on repetition. “I have attained a form filtered to its essentials,” he said, speaking of this breakthrough. He drew the same subjects again and again: a woman, flowers, a face. In this meditative state, he found delight in restraint — an exercise in simplicity, minimalism, and control, a reduction of form to the sparest of lines. Here, he fell in love with drawing again, pulling back the layers from his earlier bodies of work. Where his previous paintings built up the canvas through composition, form, and color, this series peeled those layers away to excavate what lay beneath. 

This excavation served as the entry point for Matisse’s radical next phase: the jagged, geometric cutouts that emerged as drawing gave way to reduction, and reduction to shape. When he picked up the scissors, he put down his pen. The improvisational quality of the cutouts became akin to the improvisation of jazz — also the title of his 1947 artist’s book, Jazz. A selection of these works, which he described as “drawing with scissors,” appeared in a compilation themed around circus and theater, featuring subjects such as horses and ringmasters.

A larger-than-life work, Polynésie, la Mer (1946), blends color-blocked rectangles with a kaleidoscope of cut-out forms that resemble a patchwork quilt with an almost prophetic quality. The colors subsume you; the imagery takes on the tenor of devotional iconography. These works expand the cutout technique into immersive environments of color and form. It is in the house of Matisse that we worship: not only his paintings and drawings, but also the cutouts, books, textiles, and even stained-glass works featured in the exhibition.

“You cannot imagine how much, in the cutouts period, the sensation of flying that was unleashed in me helped me to refine the motion of my hand when it guided the path of my scissors,” Matisse said. He lets loose in these works — a sense of freedom, radical joy, and euphoria prevails, even in the more understated examples. Plum Blossoms, Green Background (1948) feels meditative, a still-life that captures the quiet domesticity of flowers, color, and home. His bold use of color and pared-back juxtaposition of subject and form show up in works such as his stained-glass window piece The Vine (1953–54).

His departure from Fauvism, the art movement which he pioneered, signaled a serene confrontation with his final years and a gentle acceptance of the happiness often found in later life. The Sorrows of the King from 1952 is electric — a musical encounter with the viewer felt in both its vivid hues and its foreground, which contains a guitar and abstractions of dancing bodies. These late works do not simply express joy, but extend it outward, inviting the viewer into a shared sensory experience of color, rhythm, and movement.

Audre Lorde once said, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” Matisse’s late cutouts operate in this register — their exuberant color and restrained form offering not escape but a distilled expression of unadulterated joy, a respite from the world. Joy, here, is not incidental but structural, the foundation of Matisse’s final reinvention.