I went to the Matisse exhibition at The National Art Center, Tokyo. It was wonderful.

The 2023 Matisse exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum was a truly wonderful exhibition, but the "Matisse: Forms and Colors" exhibition I visited this time at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2024 was just as good. (Below is the link to that information.)

It is being held from February 14, 2024 (Wed) to May 27, 2024 (Mon), so as of the time this article was published (4/29), there is still time. I would strongly recommend this exhibition to everyone, not just those who love Matisse, but even those who are not particularly interested.

The link below is my note containing my impressions of last year's Matisse exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and my passionate love for Matisse. (I would be very happy if you could read it.)

Since I wrote about "Matisse for me" in the link above to the point of being tedious, I will quickly share my impressions of the exhibition here.

The exhibition content was mainly paper cutouts, but it was wide-ranging, including oil paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other works, as well as fabrics and furniture that Matisse owned. In particular, the richness of the exhibits related to the "Chapel of the Rosary," which Matisse worked on in his final years, was quite significant. I think it is content that will satisfy even those who are troubled because they want to go to the actual site but cannot! (I have never been to the site myself.)

Looking at the very early realistic oil paintings this time, I felt once again that "Matisse's eyes probably had myopia, astigmatism, and distortion in his field of vision." While part of that unique spatial distortion of Matisse is certainly intentional due to the influence of Cézanne and others, I personally think that it might have originally looked slightly distorted to him. That is why the space in his paintings has a somewhat special way of being distorted... In the end, that has become his charm, so there is no problem. (That is just my hypothesis, though.) There are many famous painters who one feels might have actually had slightly different eye conditions than the average person, aren't there?

Regardless of that,

There were many works this time that I had seen before and wanted to see again, so it was good to be able to confirm various things in that respect as well.

The chairs and fabrics that Matisse himself collected and used as subjects were good to confirm, thinking, "Oh, so this is what became this painting (I see)."

Matisse was from a textile-producing region, loved fabrics, owned quite a collection, and frequently painted them in his works. The world of "patterns" and the world Matisse painted are similar, and you can see that his birthplace and the things he loved strongly influenced that style.

Photography was prohibited in the oil painting and sculpture sections, but photography was allowed for paper cutouts and drawings, so I took a few pictures.

One of them, I was really glad to be able to see the drawing of the tree in the image below!

When I was young, I was greatly influenced by this tree painting, and those lessons are still useful to me today.

That is, "to have awareness not of the lines themselves that are drawn, but rather of the space that is not drawn," and that it is a supple and yet very unique line...

It was my first time seeing the original painting, and although it looked roughly drawn at first glance, I learned that the lines were corrected with white paint, and I thought about something too obvious, like, "He really was drawing these lines seriously after all..." Also, this painting was so big that I thought, "Was it such a huge painting?"

I have loved this kind of Matisse work since I was young, and because of that influence, our workshop's logo was born.

This was drawn by me freehand and then organized by my wife using Illustrator.

We finished it with a feeling that it is simple, clear, unforgettable once seen, and while it is organized, the subtle nuances of hand-drawing remain.

When I think of Matisse, I also think of him as someone who creates works where the sense of scale is hard to grasp. The image above is a paper cutout, but it was truly a large piece.

With his oil paintings, I often find myself thinking, 'I had no idea this was such a massive work...' or conversely, 'I thought this was a major work, but it's only about the size of a No. 6 canvas...' and so on.

The image above is the original design for the priest's vestments for the 'Chapel of the Rosary,' which Matisse worked on in his final years, and it is simply wonderful as a paper cutout work.

Once Matisse's paper cutouts are done with such simplicity and vividness, no one else can really follow that path, can they? Anything anyone else does just ends up looking like an imitation of Matisse...

The image above seems to be from when Matisse's paper cutout work was used for the cover of 'Bessatsu Bungeishunju' following the Matisse exhibition held at the Tokyo National Museum in 1951. Matisse's paper cutouts, oil paintings, and drawings are incredibly attractive and versatile as design materials, and they will never go out of style, but I personally felt that they don't quite match the Japanese language. Perhaps they might go well with something like 'kana' script.

As mentioned above, this exhibition features a corner that reproduces the 'Chapel of the Rosary' with great precision, allowing you to experience in about a minute how the colors of the stained glass affect the interior space as the sunlight changes from morning to evening. This is also a major highlight of the exhibition.

This is where the priest's vestments designed by Matisse are also displayed.

It made me think once again that Matisse was truly a radical person who did exactly as he pleased. No one but Matisse himself determined his actions...

There were many other highlights, but it would become too long, so I will end it here for now.

Once again, [I highly recommend this Matisse exhibition!]