In autumn 2024, the Fondation Beyeler will hold the first Henri Matisse retrospective in the German-speaking world in almost 20 years. Featuring over 70 works from major European and American museums and private collections, the exhibition will highlight the development and diversity of the artist’s ground-breaking oeuvre. Beginning with the early works created around 1900, it will move on to the revolutionary paintings of Fauvism and the experimental works of the 1910s, the sensual paintings of the Nice period and the 1930s, before culminating in the legendary cut-outs of the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition takes as its starting point Charles Baudelaire’s poem Invitation to the Voyage, 1857. In fact, Matisse's work contains numerous leitmotifs and key themes that are also at the centre of Baudelaire's poem.. Matisse ranks among the most famous exponents of modern art. His ground-breaking work has profoundly influenced generations of artists, from his contemporaries up to the present day. In freeing colour from the motif and simplifying forms, he redefined painting and imbued art with a hitherto unknown lightness.

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