Mediterranean Matisse(S)
Office: Aymeric Jeudy, Director of the Matisse Nice Museum, Associate Researcher at the Centre de la Méditerranée moderne et contemporaine (Université Nice Côte d’Azur)
"I who [...] am a man of the North, it was the Mediterranean that struck me the most."
Henri Matisse at Pierre Courthion (1)
The Mediterranean exercised on Matisse a continued fascination of its first visit to Corsica in 1898 to its uninterrupted attendance in Nice between 1917 and 1954, passing through numerous trips to discover Algeria, Spain, Italy and Morocco.
From the very admission of Matisse, the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that marvels it, is decisive for its work, both in the experimentation of a new language that this environment allows it to develop as in the pictorial tradition to which it connects; much more, in his mediation with the East and ancient cultures.
Matisse, who seeks to express his personal perception of the landscape, maintains a conceptual relationship with the sea and the Mediterranean in particular: a sea made up of lived, sensitive, dreamed or fantasized spaces. This “machine to make civilization[2]” as Paul Valéry (the first director of the Mediterranean University Centre created in Nice in 1933) becomes, for the painter, the place of intense chromatic and plastic research, that of the discovery of new motifs.
It is above all, behind the evidences and common places, "a very old crossroads" of which Matisse was a witness and an actor, where – according to the terms of Fernand Braudel – "everything confluenced [...] men, beasts of charge, cars, goods, ships, ideas, religions, arts of living[3]".
The exhibition thus aims to reconsider Matisse’s work through the prism of the Mediterranean and the iconic places associated with it. It traces, through various works, including several paintings rarely presented in France, the attachments, rituals, idioms related to this civilizational area and the relationship Matisse had with it.
This exhibition is made with the exceptional participation of the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’Art moderne, Paris.
It is recognized as a national interest by the Ministry of Culture and enjoys exceptional support from the State.
It is part of the Biennale des Arts et de l’Océan 2025 – “La Mer autour de nous” which is part of the organization of the United Nations Conference on the Ocean in Nice in June 2025.
[1] COURTHION, Pierre, Bavardages: uneven interviews (2013), Serge Guilbaut (dir.), Paris, Skira, 2017.
[2] VALERY, Paul, extract of the Revue Universelle, August 1, 1925.
[3] BRAUDEL, Fernand, La Méditerranée, t. II :