Henri Matisse, Intérieur à la boîte à violon, Nice, hiver 1918–1919
Huile sur toile, 73 × 60 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Lillie P. Bliss collection, 1934 © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Curated by:
Aymeric Jeudy, Director of the Musée Matisse Nice, Research Associate
at the Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine (University of Nice Côte d’Azur)
I’m a northerner, […] so it’s the Mediterranean that made the biggest impression on me.
Henri Matisse to Pierre Courthion [1]
Matisse never stopped being fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea, from his first stay in Corsica in 1898 to his uninterrupted visits to Nice between 1917 and 1954 and his many trips to Algeria, Spain, Italy and Morocco.
As Matisse himself expressed, the Mediterranean basin, with its captivating light, played a crucial role in the development of his work, inspiring him to experiment with a new visual language shaped by the region’s artistic traditions, offering him a significant connection with the Near East and its ancient cultures.
Matisse, who sought to express his own perception of landscape, had a conceptual relationship with the sea, and with the Mediterranean in particular: a sea made of places that are lived in, experienced, dreamed of or fantasized about. This “machine for making civilisation[2]” as Paul Valery (the first director of the Mediterranean University Centre established in Nice in 1933) described it, became for the painter an endless source of inspiration for his chromatic and structural research, the cradle for the discovery of new motifs.
Beyond the obvious and the clichés, it is first and foremost “a very old crossroads” of which Matisse was a witness and an actor, and where, in Fernand Braudel’s words, “everything converged […] men, beasts of burden, vehicles, merchandise, ships, ideas, religions, arts of living[3].”
The exhibition sets out to reconsider Matisse’s work through the lens of the Mediterranean Sea and its emblematic locations. It highlights, through the presentation of a variety of artworks, the ties, rituals, and dialects of this civilisational area, exploring the relationship that Matisse had with it.
This exhibition has been produced with the exceptional support of the Centre Pompidou – musée national d’Art moderne, Paris.
It has been recognised as being of national interest by the French Ministry of Culture and received a special grant from the State.
It is part of the Arts and Oceans Biennale – “The Sea around us”, which is organised in concert with the United Nations Ocean Conference held in Nice in June 2025.
[1] COURTHION, Pierre, Bavardages: les entretiens égarés (2013), Serge Guilbaut (dir.), Paris, Skira, 2017.
[2] VALERY, Paul, extract from the Revue Universelle, 1st August 1925.
[3] BRAUDEL, Fernand, La Méditerranée, t. II : Les hommes et l’héritage, Paris, Flammarion, 1986.