EXHIBITION "MATISSE MEDITERRANEAN(S)"

MAY 7 - SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

MATISSE MUSEUM

"I who [...] I am a man from the North, it is the Mediterranean that has struck me the most"
Henri Matisse to Pierre Courthion

The Mediterranean exerted a continuous fascination on Matisse from his first visit to Corsica in 1898 to his uninterrupted visit to Nice between 1917 and 1954, including numerous trips to discover Algeria, Spain, Italy and Morocco.

By Matisse's own admission, the Mediterranean basin, bathed in a light that amazed him, was decisive for his work, both in the experimentation of a new language that this environment allowed him to develop and in the pictorial tradition to which he was attached; even more, in the mediation it offered him with the Orient and ancient cultures.

Indeed, Matisse, who seeks to express his personal perception of the landscape, maintains 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 making civilization"[2] 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.

Above all, behind the obvious and the commonplace, it is "a very old crossroads" of which Matisse was a witness and an actor, where – in the words of Fernand Braudel – "everything has converged [...] men, beasts of burden, carriages, goods, ships, ideas, religions, arts of living[3] ".

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

This exhibition is produced with the exceptional participation of the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

It is recognized as being of national interest by the Ministry of Culture and as such benefits from exceptional support from the State.

It is part of the 2025 Biennale of Arts and the Ocean – "The Sea Around Us" which is part of the organization of the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice in June 2025.

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Aymeric Jeudy, Director of the Matisse Museum Nice, Associate Researcher at the Centre for the Modern and Contemporary Mediterranean (University of Nice Côte d'Azur)

Find all the information you need about https://www.musee-matisse-nice.org/fr/