We started our last day in Nice at the Matisse Museum - It's actually situated in a villa he never lived in, but it's near to his location in NIce.
We were interested to discover that the pseudo-arches around the shuttered windows were painted on, presumably to create the feeling of a grand country house.
As you enter, you see this statement:"Pour l'exécution de mes tableaux, j'ai besoin de rester pendant une suite de jours dans le même ordre de sensations et je ne trouve pas cette facilité dans un autre climat que celui de la Côte d'Azur"[To produce my paintings, I need to remain in the same emotional landscape for several days, and I find nowhere as conducive to it as the Cote d'Azur.]
When we arrived (fairly early in the AM - for us anyway), there was already a line forming on the stairs leading to the entry. We walked around to the rear entrance for PRMs (people with reduced mobility) and rang the bell. It was quite a production - a guard arrived and had to radio in that she was opening the door (I guess they are leery about recent art thefts). Another guard had to oversee. Then we took an elevator down to sign in, followed by another elevator to get up to the start of the exhibit. As mentioned in earlier posts, PRMs usually are admitted to museums for free - most often the companion is also admitted free. However, the woman at the desk seemed never to have seen a rollator before. She couldn't quite process it. She asked to see my PRM card, which of course I didn't have. I told her I was from the US and had no card. She spluttered a bit, talked to her colleague, and then asked me "Do you have proof of your legs?". Just struck us both as a funny way to put it. In the end, she decided to let me in free, but charge LInda. Which was fine. We could afford to pay. We just wanted access to the elevators.
The ground floor had a reproduction of one of Matisse's paper-cutting designs. At the end of his life, he had survived cancer and other illness and was quite debilitated as a result. He couldn't stand up to paint. So he turned to cutting paper shapes
The collection is small, but interesting. The first exhibit we visited was on the collaboration/cross-influence of Matisse on Yves Saint Laurent, particularly Matisse's use of textiles both in interior design and in fashion worn by his models.
From the Museum info:
YSL fashions
Matisse works with prominent textiles
The first is called La Robe bleu refletée dans la glace (Blue Dress Reflected in a Mirror). The second is Le Modele entre figure et decor (The model between figure and decor).
A number of other exhibits noted the way that Matisse worked and re-worked his drawings and paintings, sometimes by doing them in series' and other times reworking on the same canvas or drawing. This was one of my favorite examples of the latter.
Nude renversé étendu sur le dos - Reclining Nude, lying on her back. "[This] work retains visible traces of reworking, erasures and revisions that attest to a long process of transformation. The still perceptible red and blue marks indicate that the composition underwent several stages before being deliberately reduced to this regined, almost graphic form."