Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs / Realising what it is to be bold

I visited the Matisse at Tate Modern for a second time last night, which I'm glad about. Last week I ran in before closing one weeknight because I was prejudiciously convinced that it wasn't an exhibition for me, but I'd felt since opening that it was something of an obligation at least to nod to it, given the name (Matisse!) and the creeping realisation that some things in life are singular and may in fact be seen or missed, not recouped.

Why glad? Glad because it made me happy, and I was happy appreciating it alone with the audio guide and the relatively few anonymous participants - some alone, some in groupings - towards the later part of a late-summer evening when the humidity has passed in London but the weather hasn't approached anything like cold. There undoubtedly is a magic to the contrast of colour against a white ground, and this enlivened me, too, along with the irreality of the colour combinations, the shapes, the adjacencies of motifs, the scale and rarefaction of the pieces, and the diversity of thematic content.

Encounters with those who bring one to self-recognition are comforting, but not in that lethargic way - not the comfort of winter on the sofa with a book, the dark, a glass of wine and gentle candlelight. They comfort insofar as they deindividualise and make manifest the commonality of feeling between one and those who have brought on the initial recognition. This way it is a stimulating comfort, a reminder that, so often alone, one is not really so, that one's thoughts are shared by others and - and this is what I have taken from my encounter with the thoughts-made-real of Matisse - that they, while common because shared, are the fodder of singular efforts of creativity leading to unique products of self-expression for collective appreciation, maybe even participation.

Matisse was bold. For whatever reason (for perhaps his background and personal and social circumstances facilitated this) he was bold; believing in what he did and doing it. The curators aver that the transition from paint and brush to paper and scissors was not due to failing health; that it was in fact an artistic decision to use a different medium, which they obliquely illustrate through showing two paintings from the late forties, contemporaneous with his early cut-outs. With this they seek to correct the common wisdom about Matisse's transition. I read in this his boldness, but what also strikes me as humility. Difficult though it is to proffer this conclusion without knowing more - for surely the exhibition's organisers would seek to elevate Matisse, presenting him favourably and lovably - this I have taken from my experience based on the works, the accompanying paper guide, the audio guide and my artistic and personal judgment.

Humble because he was not forceful, and bold because he laboured in spite of a sense that others would not understand what he was doing: "I know that it will only be much later that people will realise to what extent the work I am doing today is in step with the future," he's cited as saying on the final page of the exhibition guide. Reading it again after inserting it here, I wonder if there isn't a hint of arrogance, but let us say that in fact it shows self-belief. For how can we see a man who immersed himself in his practice, transforming his studio and his bedroom into mock-ups of the eventual resting places of much of his art (like the Vence chapel), who responded when asked about the joy of his work under occupation in wartime "I do it in self-defence", and who candidly told his wife that he loved her dearly but that he loved painting more, a properly arrogant man?

Matisse's cut-outs advert to the need for unadulterated apprehension of our world, and celebrate the richnesses of such efforts of perceiving. They undogmatically militate against fixed modes of perception and implore us to see our world as it could be. That way, they radiate inspirationally, representing so much more than the necessary physicality of their presence. I sense an unrelenting humanity in these works and feel that they are the products of someone who urgently and keenly wanted to demonstrate the virtue of our capacities for respect and love in order to harness those as frightening, immensely potent forces of humanity in the battle against their opposites. And while I close this curt and ready thought-piece on what you might have read as a trite note of hyperbole, think: maybe I really did feel that.