Winchester Discovery Centre is currently showing the touring South Bank exhibition, Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, Late Works 1950-54. It comprises 35 lithographs of the large-scale cutouts Matisse made in the last years of his life. The technique of cutting coloured paper with scissors was an answer to the limitations imposed by physical incapacity, but also a perfect means for Matisse to express his ongoing artistic vision as it reached its final stage. With scissors, he could create coloured forms without a preliminary stage of drawing, and this immediacy helped him to release a whole world of joyous, musical life. Dancers, nudes, animals and plants are reduced to their essential forms, on the threshold between figuration and abstraction. Often they are set against blocks of clashing vibrant colours, overlapping in syncopated rhythms. Sometimes fruit and swaying plants floats over empty space. A series of blue nudes, showing the same figure in slightly altered positions, is a lesson in perceiving feeling shimmering through shifting form.The atmosphere is one of vitality or serenity: the images are too deeply contemplated to be wild and disordered, and one feels a sense of passionate life lived within the frame, within a proper harmonic pattern. It is festive art but not anarchic, decorative but dramatic, never insipid. The accompanying music by Satie, with simple lines hinting at an ancient, timeless origin, seemed perfect. Within the joyous and dreamy world of these images one sometimes senses a darker note: the mysterious black in Zulma, or the sorrowful king and phantasmal figure in Tristesse du Roi (pictured). So the show is many things. A final and glorious leave-taking. A parting masterclass in exactness: Matisse was very precise over the exact colours his assistants were to prepare, and his sense of form here is the result of a lifetime of clarifying discipline. It is an escape from the confinements of the world and the wheelchair into the boundless world of imagination and grace, a voyage from the modern world to its ancient, mythical roots, a return from the end of life to its beginning, to find the child's eye still lively and intact. The best way to enjoy the cutouts is no doubt to do them yourself, and Sophie Higgs's Education pack has some hints on this, as well as all the essentials on Matisse. We're fortunate to have such a high-class exhibition close at hand. It's a perfect Mediterranean antidote to the February chill.
