Matisse exhibition at AIC shows a creative hitting his stride in his 70s

Artists follow varied career paths. Some maintain strong, steady production throughout their lifetimes. Some fade over time. Some are one-hit wonders who score success with one body of work that they can never replicate.

But few accomplish what Henri Matisse did at the end of his career when his output seemingly declined. An explosion of energy and innovation re-ignited his creativity in the 1940s and thrust the septuagenarian back into the spotlight.

The first recharged project was the 1947 artist book “Jazz,” and its featured “cut-outs” are the centerpiece of a newly opened exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that runs through June 1.

“Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color” is not an expansive retrospective or major survey. There is no catalog, no high-profile loans nor any big historical points being made.

That said, this compact, thoughtfully installed show has its own appeal. It offers the museum’s first-ever display of all 20 color plates from “Jazz” as well as a focused, digestible look at the artist’s trajectory to that point.

Organized by Emily Ziemba, a research curator in the museum’s department of prints and drawings, the exhibition also gives viewers a welcome chance to see a sizable swath of the Art Institute’s expansive collection of Matisse, including pieces rarely shown. The museum acquired its first example by the artist in 1922 – a print. And it has added works by him nearly every year since, including “The Seamstress” (1900), donated by gallerist Richard Gray and his wife, Mary, in 2022.

Matisse’s cut-outs were assembled with colorful abstract and semi-abstracted shapes that he cut from gouached sheets of paper and then collaged, arranging on the walls of his studio and transferring into a host of other media. He turned to this inventive technique after debilitating abdominal surgery in 1941 and pursued it almost exclusively from the mid-1940s until his death in 1954.

The 20 eye-grabbing 16½-by-26-inch plates from “Jazz” were exactingly reproduced by the Tériade printing atelier in Paris using hand-painted color stencils. They depict circus scenes, mythological figures and the artist’s memories of Tahiti. Their sharp-edged forms exuberant colors and graphic boldness still throb with a sense of freshness and contemporaneity nearly 80 years after they were created.

The original edition of “Jazz” consisted of 250 copies (another 100 copies of just the color plates were also printed). The Art Institute smartly purchased its copy of the artist book a year after its release for just $375 – an unbelievable bargain from today’s vantage point.

In addition to “Jazz,” this show concludes with another major cut-out, “Oceania-The Sea” (1948), which textile designer Zika Ascher screenprinted and transferred onto an expansive 5½-by-12½-foot linen sheet.

Also on view are artist books and earlier artworks. The show does a nice job of highlighting some of the recurring subject matter in Matisse’s art, especially his odalisques, or reclining nudes, like the 31-inch-tall bronze “Seated Nude” (1922-29, cast 1951) or the lithograph “Large Odalisque in Striped Pantaloons” (1925).

Viewers can see hints of what was to come, none more telling than “Daisies” (1939). Sections of the oil on canvas almost appear to be cut out and collaged into place. The open, highly simplified rendering of a woman in the lower left in bold red and black prefigures his approach with the cut-outs.

Though it was not necessarily intended that way, “Matisse’s Jazz” serves as a perfect follow-up to a 2023-2024 show in the prints and drawings galleries that focused on Matisse’s modernist counterpart and occasional rival, Pablo Picasso.

“We haven’t done a Matisse project in our [print and drawings] galleries ever,” Ziemba said, “so I just think it was naturally time.”