Matisse Méditerranée(s)

The Mediterranean held a constant fascination for Matisse from his first visit to Corsica in 1898 to his uninterrupted visit to Nice between 1917 and 1954, via Algeria, Spain, Italy and Morocco. By Matisse's own admission, the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that amazed him, was crucial to his work, both in the experimentation of a new language that this environment allowed him to develop and in the pictorial tradition to which it was linked; even more so, in the mediation it offered him with the Orient and ancient cultures.

Indeed, Matisse, who sought to express his personal perception of the landscape, maintained a conceptual relationship with the sea and with the Mediterranean in particular: a sea made up of lived, sensitive, dreamed or fantasized spaces. This "machine for manufacturing civilization" as Paul Valéry (first director of the Mediterranean University Center created in Nice in 1933) called it, became, for the painter, the place of intense chromatic and plastic research, that of the discovery of new motifs.

It is above all, behind the obvious and the commonplaces, "a very old crossroads" of which Matisse was a witness and an actor, where - in the words of Fernand Braudel - "everything converged (...) man, beasts of burden, cars, goods, ships, ideas, religions, arts of living".

The exhibition thus seeks to reconsider Matisse's work through the prism of the Mediterranean and the emblematic places associated with it. It traces, through varied works, including several paintings rarely presented in France, the ties, rituals, idioms linked to this civilizational area and the relationship that Matisse had with it.