Who Owns This House?

Installation view of Chez Matisse: The Legacy of a New Approach to Painting at CaixaForum Madrid. In the foreground: Henri Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904. The staggered pink walls create sightlines between the works, revealing the exhibition itself as a system of spaces, relationships and curatorial decisions. Photo: DOKUNST, 2025.

An exhibition calling itself Chez Matisse makes a promise. It invites us not merely to contemplate a completed body of work, but to enter a place: a house with rooms, thresholds, affinities and guests. At CaixaForum Madrid, this house has been built with remarkable openness. The exhibition avoids the oppressive celebration of an unassailable master and instead presents Henri Matisse in company. His paintings, sculptures and works on paper are joined by works by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, Barnett Newman, Daniel Buren, Baya and others. Curated by Aurélie Verdier, Chief Curator of Modern Collections at the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition seeks to move beyond the idea of influence as a one-way transmission. It prefers to speak of hospitality, encounter and artistic kinships that need not always be historically documented in order to become visible. This is an intelligent point of departure. Yet every house has an order, and even the most generous invitation does not answer the question of who allocates its rooms.

Almost one hundred works have been assembled in Madrid, approximately half by Matisse and half by artists who worked alongside him, responded to him or can now be brought into his orbit. Eight chronological and thematic sections lead from the early self-portrait of around 1900 through Fauvism, primitivism, war, abstraction and Mediterranean light to the late paper cut-outs and their legacy. At first, this structure appears familiar. In fact, it subtly shifts the conventional narrative. Matisse is not presented as a sovereign inventor whose forms were subsequently adopted by others, but as an artist who continually received, tested, rejected and began again. Here lies one of the exhibition’s principal strengths: it corrects the comfortable image of a painter to whom beauty came without effort.

Few modern artists have been so successfully replaced by their most pleasurable qualities. Matisse is regarded as the painter of light, arabesque, open windows, relaxed bodies and a colour that seems to have shed the entire weight of history. His art is readily confused with joy itself, as though it had taken possession of the world through temperament rather than labour. Yet Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904 already contradicts this assumption. The painting seduces, but it does not rest. Its fragmented fields of colour, the tension between contour and light and the tentative uncertainty of its space do not reveal an artist confidently presenting a finished language. They show someone testing how far the visible world can be dissolved without losing its presence. The celebrated lightness is the result of an exertion whose traces Matisse subsequently sought to remove as completely as possible.

Verdier understands this exertion. Her Matisse is not a virtuoso of effortless solutions, but a worker suspicious of his own success. The exhibition cites his assertion that an artist must never become a prisoner of himself, of his style, of his reputation or of his success. It might be dismissed as a conventional declaration of artistic renewal were Matisse’s work not genuinely marked by repeated crises. He did not develop a recognisable form and then proceed to perfect it. Whenever his painting was in danger of becoming identifiable as a style—and therefore repeatable—he placed its assumptions at risk once more. The passage from Fauvist explosions of colour to compressed interiors, from the sensual figure to the severe paintings of the war years and eventually to forms cut directly with scissors is neither linear nor conciliatory. Matisse escapes himself by repeatedly entering situations in which he does not yet know how a picture can be completed.

The Black Window

The decisive moment in this exhibition is therefore not where colour shines most brightly. It lies within a black surface. Porte-fenêtre à Collioure, begun in the autumn of 1914, depicts an open French window that gives onto no visible exterior. Between narrow strips of colour stands a black rectangle, at once depth and refusal, night and impenetrable surface. The painting was neither signed nor completed. Matisse kept it until his death. Perhaps he understood that any further explanation would have destroyed its peculiar tension.

Before this painting, the notion of a merely joyful Matisse disintegrates. The window—traditionally an instrument through which painting connects interior and exterior—opens here onto an uncertainty that remains unresolved. The date is hardly incidental. The First World War had begun; Collioure was no longer simply a site of southern light. Yet the work cannot be reduced to historical symbolism. Its blackness is not an illustration of catastrophe. It feels instead like the recognition that a painting need not always guide the gaze through itself; it may also reject it. Painting becomes a threshold that refuses entry.

The juxtaposition with Kupka’s vertical pictorial structures is among the exhibition’s most convincing curatorial decisions. It does not propose a simple line of dependence, but renders visible two different paths towards the liberation of the picture plane. In Kupka, the vertical arrangements strive towards their own abstract logic; in Matisse, the memory of door, room and landscape persists even as the represented world almost disappears. Similarity makes the difference more precise. Here the idea of hospitality fulfils its purpose: another work is not introduced to confirm Matisse’s importance, but to sharpen the particularity of his decision.

Not every encounter in the exhibition attains this intensity. Some affinities arise from documented relationships, others from shared problems of colour, surface or space, and others still from formal resemblances generated by the display itself. This is not, in itself, an objection. Exhibitions are not archives in which only documented contact may be admitted. They are entitled to form hypotheses and to bring works into confrontation across time and geography. The difficulty begins when such comparisons reduce the invited artist to his or her usefulness within the host’s narrative.

The language of hospitality can conceal this asymmetry with particular elegance. Those who are invited acquire visibility, yet remain guests. The host determines the occasion, the seating plan and the context in which each participant is allowed to speak. When works by Goncharova, Baya, Anna-Eva Bergman or Zoulikha Bouabdellah enter Matisse’s house, the relevant question is therefore not only what they may have absorbed from him. It is equally important to ask what their work makes visible that escapes his order. An exhibition seeking to overcome a linear history of influence cannot be satisfied merely by multiplying the number of lines if they all continue to converge upon the same centre.

The inclusion of female and non-European positions nevertheless ranks among the exhibition’s most productive decisions. It does more than diversify an otherwise predominantly male genealogy. It touches upon a conflict fundamental to Matisse’s work: the relationship between the decorative and the supposedly autonomous picture, between body and ornament, and between European modernism and the forms it sought, acquired and translated into its own language from beyond Europe. In Matisse, the background may press against the figure, absorb it or almost consume it. In Figure décorative sur fond ornemental of 1925–26, the human body is no longer self-evidently the centre to which carpet, wallpaper and pattern must remain subordinate. Everything claims presence. The decorative is not an embellishment added to painting; it becomes the instrument through which the picture’s traditional hierarchy is challenged.

This does not remove the historical burden of the odalisque or of the European gaze upon North Africa. The exhibition attempts to open this context not through retrospective condemnation, but by introducing new voices. Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s position is particularly persuasive because she neither accepts Matisse’s female nudes without question nor seeks to remove them from visibility. The bodies become objects of renewed enquiry: Who is looking, who is being seen, and must every representation of the female body remain permanently imprisoned within the original order of the gaze? This amounts to more than a contemporary supplement. It is an attempt to read a historical work under changed conditions without declaring it innocent or depriving it of its capacity to acquire different meanings.

Within this context, Baya appears less as a successor than as a deliberately constructed relative. Her luxuriant ornamental pictorial world can be connected to Matisse, but such a connection should not hastily be converted into a history of influence. It is, first of all, a curatorial hypothesis. That can be fruitful, provided difference is not erased. Baya does not require Matisse in order to possess artistic significance. If her work appears here solely as an echo of his decorative freedom, invitation becomes incorporation. If, however, it reveals how limited the European conception of the decorative was, and how much it absorbed from other visual cultures, the guest retrospectively alters the architecture of the house.

The Collection as Invisible Author

Behind the visible arrangement of the works lies a second and less openly acknowledged order: the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Most of the exhibits have travelled from Paris. The exhibition is consequently determined not only by a curatorial idea, but by the history of institutional acquisition. What a collection owns can be displayed, compared and condensed into a narrative; what it lacks can easily appear secondary or remain invisible. Chez Matisse therefore does not simply tell us who Matisse was. It tells us which Matisse can be convincingly constructed from the holdings of the Centre Pompidou.

This is not a weakness that could be remedied by compiling a wish list of celebrated loans. No exhibition can contain everything, and an accumulation of masterpieces does not in itself produce an argument. Nevertheless, absences must be taken seriously. La joie de vivre, La danse, L’Atelier rouge and Femme au chapeau are not here. Nor are the monumental original gouaches découpées, through which Matisse most radically reorganised colour, drawing and space, represented with the force one might expect from an exhibition promising to extend its narrative towards his late artistic freedom. Jazz bears witness to the crucial turn towards cutting directly into colour, but the book can only suggest the physical dimension of the large paper cut-outs.

These gaps help explain why the Matisse of the war years acquires such force in Madrid. The collection is particularly dense in this area, and from that density emerges an artist for whom black is as important as red, whose closed or darkened windows contradict the open vistas of the Mediterranean, and whose apparent tranquillity is repeatedly unsettled by uncertainty. The result is not necessarily a less complete Matisse. It is a different one: less iconic, less immediately consumable and closer to the unresolved problems of painting. The limitations of the collection become a means of discovery, provided they are not mistaken for completeness.

The arrival of Luxe, calme et volupté in Spain for the first time undoubtedly has the character of an event. Yet the exhibition is strongest where it does not depend upon the status of individual masterpieces. Through the encounters between still lifes, interiors and figures, we see how Matisse treated objects not in isolation, but as forces within a pictorial field. Alongside Bonnard, Picasso or Françoise Gilot, the question of influence changes. What matters is no longer who first employed a particular form, but how differently artists respond to the same problem: How can an interior possess both depth and flatness? How does an object assert itself once colour no longer serves its description? When does pattern become space, and when does a body become ornament?

The juxtapositions with Barnett Newman and Daniel Buren also become persuasive when they are not treated as belated proof of Matisse’s prophetic greatness. Matisse need not have anticipated either American Colour Field painting or the institutionally critical practices of post-war Europe for a relationship with them to be established. An artwork does not become more significant because everything that followed is presumed to have been contained within it. On the contrary, such retrospective genealogies often diminish both predecessor and successor. More interesting is the possibility that certain questions return without producing the same answers. Colour as spatial force, the relationship between scale and intensity, the boundary between picture and surrounding environment: Matisse did not solve these problems conclusively. He formulated them with sufficient precision for others to take them up again under altered conditions.

Here, ultimately, lies the quality of Verdier’s exhibition. She does not turn Matisse into an origin from which the twentieth century was obliged to emerge. She presents him as a point of convergence, albeit an overwhelmingly powerful one. Her exhibition opens convincing spaces in which historical proximity, formal resonance and curatorial speculation can coexist. Yet it requires the visitor to distinguish between these different kinds of relationship. Not every guest was a friend, not every resemblance constitutes an influence, and not every retrospectively constructed kinship possesses the same historical or aesthetic validity.

The title’s question therefore returns at the end. Who owns this house? Matisse, because every room bears his name? Aurélie Verdier, because she has arranged the encounters? The Centre Pompidou, because its collection supplies the load-bearing walls? Or the works themselves, which sometimes resist the role assigned to them? Perhaps the exhibition’s true achievement is that this question cannot be answered unequivocally. The house is open, but it is not free of authority. Its hospitality is generous, but it does not abolish the hierarchy between host and guest. Its collection enables discovery while simultaneously determining what may be discovered.

Matisse’s greatness does not lie in every path leading back to him. It lies in his capacity to generate relationships that do not leave his own authority intact. A truly hospitable house is recognised, after all, not by the number of guests it can accommodate, but by whether they are permitted to leave without having to continue bearing the name of their host.

Pablo Picasso, Nature morte au bougeoir, 8 April 1944. Objects and space are fractured into angular forms held together by visual tension. Photo: DOKUNST, 2025.

Henri Matisse, Marguerite au chat noir, early 1910. Figure and ornament converge in a portrait that is both frontal and intimate. Photo: DOKUNST, 2025.

Emil Nolde, Still Life with Two Dancers, 1914. Flowers, an animal figure and a dance scene form an expressive, almost altar-like arrangement. Photo: DOKUNST, 2025.

Georges Braque, Petite baie de La Ciotat, June 1907. Pointillist touches and softened contrasts mark Braque’s farewell to Fauvism. Photo: DOKUNST, 2025.

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