Matisse no longer paints, he cuts. From his bed, immobilized and surrounded by assistants and sheets of gouache paper, he turns color into light sculpture, into ephemeral architecture. This is the final Matisse that the Grand Palais in Paris presents from March 24 to August 2, 2026, with a retrospective devoted to the years 1941-1954. Not an epilogue, but a silent revolution that forever changed the perception of form and space. On view are more than two hundred works - paintings, drawings, textiles, glass pieces, illustrated books - that reveal an artist forced to reinvent himself yet able to transform physical fragility into creative strength. In the cut-outs, color becomes pure matter, cut, shifted, recomposed. No longer a simple vehicle of emotion but an architecture of signs, able to inhabit walls and converse with light. Decoration is no longer ornament but a total language, an energy that shapes both environment and perception. The exhibition route avoids a celebratory tone and exposes the tensions of those years: on the one hand, the continuity of traditional painting; on the other, the radical rupture of the découpage, where monumentality and lightness coexist. Here lies the courage of the artist, ready to abandon the conventions he himself had established in order to open a new space for gesture and imagination. The result is an exhibition devoted to a lesser-known Matisse, no longer only the Master of Fauvism but a radical innovator already speaking the language of contemporary art. His sharp cuts, flat and vibrant colors anticipate sensibilities that would flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and still resonate in many artistic practices today. The years between 1941 and 1954 are therefore not a minor chapter but a vital laboratory, where limits turn into possibilities and vulnerability generates invention. With this exhibition, Paris offers the chance to see how Matisse, until the very end, reinvented color as an absolute, boundless force.
