The exhibition "The Last Matisse - Paper Morphologies" curated by Vittoria Mainoldi, starting from February 28th until June 28th, 2026 at the Historical Infantry Museum of Rome, exhibits some of the most famous and precious works on paper by the Master of Fauvism, a movement characterized by the bold and anti-naturalistic use of color.

At the end of the First World War, Matisse closes his fauve season gradually abandoning painting to give life to new expressive forms, ranging from drawing to graphics, from designing stage sets and theatrical costumes, to the papier découpés, the famous colored papers that he cuts and reassembles to create formal synthesis in the images. This is the Nice period, which actually lasts almost thirty-five years, longer in proportion to the years of the Parisian avant-garde.

From his numerous books and works on paper, all different in style and technique, making it difficult to label Matisse in one art movement rather than another, a strong sensitivity to line and color emerges, becoming the solid pillars of an architecture aimed at achieving the essential. It is a gradual linguistic renewal that extends his chromatic research, but at the same time takes it to extreme consequences.

Through graphics, Matisse can work on the limit, the limit of the line, on everything. In many works on paper, in fact, the figure seems to emerge from an internal tension rather than a defined outline. The Matissean line, apparently fluid and natural, is often the product of a long mental elaboration, where every superfluous mark is eliminated.