Why Matisse at Tate Modern really is a once-in-a-lifetime show

Matisse’s exuberant, fluid, late-period cut-outs are coming to London, as previewed by Culture Whisper. Biographer Hilary Spurling paints a vivid picture of how the 70-year-old painter, stuck in occupied France, recovering from an almost fatal bout with cancer and negotiating a bitter divorce, began to work with collage (The Fall of Icarus being the first cut-out work). Now the show itself, due to open at Tate Modern on 17 April, is garnering an atmosphere something like legend of its own. Curators like to use the expression ‘once in a lifetime’, but in the case of Matisse’s cut-outs, Sir Nicholas Serota might just have a point, as a Tate insider revealed.

‘Nick Serota is in a unique position to persuade private collectors to lend these immensely fragile works. There hasn't been a serious cut-outs show for almost 40 years, and to gather the pieces from all over the world is an enormous challenge. The show is travelling to New York MoMA after Tate – so collectors are parting with these important and delicate pieces for months, whilst they are transported across the globe. That's quite scary if a piece hasn’t left your private collection for multiple decades.

‘Nick curates shows infrequently (most recently Cy Twomby in 2008, and Richter in 2012) and only does so when it is important and meaningful to him. As a collector, it’s hard to say no to Nick – a titan of the art world – when he picks up the phone and asks to borrow your piece personally. As a result, the show is going to consist of works that only he could gather, and the exhibition is unlikely ever to be replicated. It really is a landmark show.’

‘A highlight of the exhibition,’ say the Tate, ‘will be the opportunity to bring an array of Matisse’s most iconic works together for the first time since they were created in his studio. Photographs of the studio reveal that works including the series The Snail, 1953, its sister work Memory of Oceania, 1953, and Large Decoration with Masks, 1953, were initially conceived as a unified whole. Visitors to Tate will be able to enjoy these large-scale works reunited for the first time.’

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