New exhibition in Rome documents Henri Matisse's final and most transformative years through artist books, cut-paper, and drawings.

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Rome’s newest art exhibition at Museo Storico della Fanteria trunks its focus to the final, radical period of Henri Matisse’s career, and is a sure experience to captivate both art-world enthusiasts and casual surveyors.

L’Ultimo Matisse: Morfologie di Carta (The Last Matisse: Paper Morphologies), curated by contemporary art curator Vittoria Mainoldi, traces the French artist’s final years with precision and sensitivity. Defined by bold experimentation with découpé, collage, and publishing, this late period is not an epilogue, but a reinvention. 

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) stands as one of the most reverent artists of twentieth century modernism. A leading force in Fauvism – an artistic style which prioritized bold coloring and styling over the realism of the Impressionist era – Matisse was a tour de force in reinventing. From luminous paintings and sculptures to illustrated books and cut-paper découpés, his art was pursuant of radical simplicity, imbuing form and color into works that once seemed deeply deliberate.

Mainoldi structures the exhibit as though it were a book, unfolding across four vibrants chapters of blue (Verve), yellow (Libri d’artista e libri illustrati), magenta (Jazz), and black (Disegno). Each room is an oasis of intimacy, immersing visitors in the artist’s metamorphosis of the mid-twentieth century – a period marked by physical ailments yet extraordinary creative freedom. 

Verve features works produced for the eponymous postwar magazine, a staple of visual experimentation. Here, Matisse found freedom in vibrant lithographs and democratising the artistic process, channeling immediacy through color and simple forms. 

In Libri d’artista e libri illustrati, focus shifts to Matisse’s endeavor of illustrations for artist’s books, ranging from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies to James Joyce’s Ulysses. His signature continuous lines – often known now as the “Matissean line” – bring vitality to written text. The drawings move beyond illustrations and textual collaborations, and propose instead a reimagination of books as shared space for the visual and literary. 

Jazz takes the shape of the artist’s book of the same name, marking a decisive shift from painting to découpés. Here, Experimentation came in the harmony of saturated colors, bold silhouettes and biographical text. These elements exist in rhythm, depicting Matisse’s belief that art is a visual language. 

Lastly, Disegno carries Matisse’s work at their most bare and intimate. Charcoal on white paper, line and void work in tandem express a distilled intimacy. For Matisse, drawings – whether nudes, still lives or faces – were the final result, a final expression of memory in its rawest form.

Taken together, Matisse’s final works represent art as sites of dialogue rather than decoration. In assembling these final pieces, L’Ultimo Matisse reveals limitation became liberation, and how reinvention, even in waning years, defines an enduring legacy. 

L’Ultimo Matisse will run from 28 February to 28 June at the Museo Storico della Fanteria.

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