The exhibition shows the creating process on pictures and videos: Henri Matisse is on a wheelchair whereas his assistant holding a paper and the artist with large scissors gliding through the painted sheets. The rich colour of the shapes is guache paint. Tate's colour conservator reveals, as she could see the works very close, that a lot of the paper shapes are in some parts torn rather than cut. This makes it clear that the creating process was fast and passionate; Matisse was in a hurry to make art happen and, maybe, feared to stop (as worked even at nights) as stopping would mean dying.
Matisse used pins to attach the cut-outs so he could always rotate, rearrange and move the pieces around to create a wanted shape. Today the shapes are molded into their final positions. But during the artist working process the art works seemed airy and alive moving on his studio walls. Matisse was not creating paintings. He was creating spaces.
In fact he was even disappointed about the printed cut-outs illustrations for the Jazz book: printing "removes their sensitivity". At the exhibition next to the printed illustrations there are original art works where we can see that the paper pieces were layered.
Today collage artists tag their works and search online for #cutandpaste #cutart #scissorsart #papersculpture #gluepaperscissors #cutnpaste #paperlove #collageart #papercut #cutout #papercutdesign #paperartist #paperart. Henri Matisse was focused on cutting rather than pasting, but this exhibition at Tate Modern is very important for collage, recycling and any mixed media artist as it is an acknowledgement of the new medium they all use today in different ways. The medium that is created in a 3D but presented as a 2D.