 Thank you Evelyn and I'm going to add to the chorus of thanks to the Barnes Foundation and to Sylvie for the invitation to speak today and also to the team here at the Barnes who really have welcomed us so warmly especially Aliyah who has just managed everything. I can't say enough good things about her and all of us here I think feel an enormous debt of gratitude to George and Wanda at the Matisse archives and to Barbara Dutui and I would say that the dialogue with the three of them over the course of our work on Matisse has really been essential. We're delighted to be here Carl and I to discuss the research around our exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art on Rematisse the Cutouts. The spark for the exhibition and the work at its conceptual and philosophical core is the museum's monumental cutout the swimming pool. In 1952 Matisse created this cutout composed in a palette of blue cut shapes against a freeze of white paper and it was pinned to the burlap covered walls of his dining room spanning all four walls and I think most of you know kind of the origin story of this work but I'll just say it again. So Matisse had asked Lydia to take him to a local pool to see divers and he got there and it was so hot that he said oh I have to go home to get out of this heat and when he got home he said I'm going to make my own pool and that's exactly what he did. After Matisse's death the work was traced and removed from the walls and then mounted onto nine panels each of which consisted of the cut blue shapes the white paper and the burlap ground. The swimming pool was acquired by MoMA and then by 1993 following its installation in John Elderfield's Matisse retrospective it was determined that the condition of the burlap had so deteriorated that the swimming pool could no longer be shown. In 2008 Karl Buckberg our senior conservator at the museum set out to conserve this work and from the very beginning of his efforts Karl and I spoke about the possibility of organizing a small exhibition around the swimming pool and as we explored the idea as all of you know we've seen the show we concluded that a broader reassessment of Matisse's cutouts a closer look at at the whole body of work was due. The swimming pool though was really a lens for us through which Matisse's practice could be understood. So in embarking on our work together we asked three seemingly simple questions what is a cutout how is it made and what does that making mean. So today I will start out by discussing how we came to answer those questions then I'm going to turn the podium over to Karl to discuss the conservation of the swimming pool and then I'm going to return to the podium again to address the place of the swimming pool in Matisse's practice. So as a review which I think most of you don't need but I'll do it anyway um in the final decade of his life Matisse worked with painted paper as his primary medium and scissors as his chief implement inventing a new form of new form of art that came to be called a cutout. Matisse cut painted sheets into various shapes from the organic to the geometric which he then arranged into lively compositions striking for their play with color and contrast. He described this approach as drawing with scissors. Though this story generally begins in the mid 1940s Matisse had already been using cut paper in the 1930s as an expedient as we heard earlier to shortcut his laborious process of revision. So it was not yet a method and I'm showing you the Barnes mural where which we're lucky enough to experience first hand here and for which he used this this cut cut paper expedient. So and and that cut paper allowed him to sculpt and abstract the figures and flatten the space they dance the figures dancing. So it wasn't until his work on jazz one of the 20th century's great artist books that what had began as an expedient became a full-blown method what Matisse described as a cut out operation. In this operation cutting was more than a simple procedure it provided him a system of expanding the possibilities of shape and composition. So if you think about making a cut into a sheet of paper you automatically get two shapes and if you cut out a shape you know completely then you get what's really a positive and a negative what we would call a positive and negative but from Matisse all those forms were equally valid and you can see that in a work like this composition black and red where the you know this form is cut out of this this piece of paper and so both of them find a equal place in the composition. So cutting allowed Matisse to see all possibilities of form the positives and negatives as I'm showing you here reversals and inverses that you see throughout jazz and also the organic relations between shapes their generation from one to another. From the beginning of our research we were retuned to the um well let me back up in addition to the making um to the thinking through of the possibilities of cutting from the beginning of our research we were retuned to the life of the cutouts in Matisse's studio. While the studio while the studio had long been a subject for Matisse as we saw in so many presentations and in the last day or so in the invention and making of the cutouts the studio went from being a subject to the support using his studio walls as a blank canvas Matisse composed and recomposed his cut paper forms. Matisse lived in and among his cutouts orchestrating a luminous environment. Our attention to Matisse's studio stemmed in large part from our work on the swimming pool itself an environment it encouraged it encouraged us to take note of Matisse's environmental ambitions but there were two other parts of our research that pushed us in this direction first the Matisse's the work's material properties Matisse created this work with two simple materials white paper and gouache and an unorthodox implement a pair of scissors studio assistants painted sheets of paper with gouache selected by Matisse and after they dried Matisse would choose a sheet and as he put it cut directly into vivid color Matisse would use pins to compose his forms pinning them to a board that sat on his lap or directing assistants to pin forms onto the wall and it was this use of pins that we concluded was absolutely essential to Matisse and essential to our understanding of the work something pinned as you all know can be unpinned and therefore it can be changed so this seemingly small observation had enormous consequences leading us to understand the studio as a place of constant revision and flux as Matisse continually revised and altered these works and the works themselves also told the story in the hundreds of pinholes that you can still see a record of the process of their making lending support to this material understanding was access to photographs from the Matisse archive and other archives which corroborated our sense of the work's contingency and mutability forms were pinned in one grouping and then removed to join another and so you can see here this work from the menial originally on the wall was in a kind of side-by-side configuration and then was eventually it found its way to this final version and this vertical configuration and there are lots of examples of that whole compositions were moved from one wall to another or one studio to another moreover these photographs also helped us to understand the importance of Matisse's engagement with the walls of his studio and his ambitions to work on an architectural scale and I'm showing what you can see from the the caption these are various slides of the parakeet and mermaid in process by the time Matisse began work on the pool he had already made the move from his lap to the wall using those surfaces to compose and consider his work in cut paper installing editing shifting and altering assemblies of forms from smaller works clustered on architectural surfaces to form patchwork holes that you can see here each element subject to continual editing Matisse's ambitions grew provoking him to stretch larger compositions across his studio walls extending vertically and laterally into and across corners from floor to ceiling and exploiting the compositional structural and decorative possibilities of the wall as a surface without a frame moving beyond the bounds of easel painting the Vaughn's chapel of course gave Matisse the opportunity to think environmentally the reach of that project extended from the luminous effects of stained glass and the contrasting whiteness of the tile to how the colors of the garments worn by the priests as they moved to the chapel's interior would impact the visual and physical experience of worshipers the influence of this project is immeasurable fueling Matisse's desire to go bigger with cut paper our hope then for the exhibition was to get back to this fluctuating and ever-changing place that was the studio and to show that the cutouts had two lives first on the studio walls where they were contingent and mutable when shapes were merely pinned exhibited pliability and moved with a breeze and second after they left the studio when they were glued down and made permanent this interest we had in conveying the liveliness of the cutout to Matisse's studio was shared by some of Matisse's friends and colleagues who visited the studio and were astonished by what they saw arrayed across the walls andre rouvier argued for the cutouts material qualities quote these paper cutouts have a very pure existence when they escape from your hands your scissors their papery substance with subtle plays of light on their flexibility and the very physics of this flexibility all contribute to the making of a miraculous thing that retains its essence when stuck up on the wall with pins by Lydia and I'm showing you a little bit of an earlier work from the 1930s but just this is a work that still has that kind of flexibility and I'm showing it to you obviously in raking lights you can really see the way the work kind of had a pliability and was kind of leaned off the wall. Emmy Mog's take is even more intriguing in a 1948 letter he grapples with what he saw during a recent visit noting the work's rhythm he wonders if it might be quote a starting point for the realization of an interesting film where rhythm colors forms and sounds would come together and respond to each other along the lines of Walt Disney's Fantasia very intriguing yes so while the notion of a filmic version of the cutouts is fascinating I think that's a whole other thing we should look at it doesn't solve the issue of in-person presentation which was which was our focus for that Mog reports he has conducted his own experiment focusing on the essential role of the pins what he calls the manifestation of the fixing point in his plan the cutouts would live in a shadowpox cut paper pinned with phonograph with phonograph needles and says a quote that once rusted would solidly be embedded in a plywood support and he even understood that the degradation of materials just to follow up on our miss or just their recent presentation he writes a piece of wax paper placed between the paper and the wood will prevent the paper from touching the acid-soaked wood though there is no rejoinder from Matisse to this tantalizing suggestion if only our new presentation of the swimming pool allowed us to take up the possibilities that the pins offer and emphasizes and emphasize Matisse's engagement with the walls of the studio his embrace of contingency his deployment of the visual power of positive and negative his keen sense of balance and color and with that I'm going to turn it over to Carl for the next section the viewer is struck by the cut paper sections with conspicuously varied brush applications this is the result of the individual application of gouache to each sheet of paper varied because of the thickness of gouache use and also by the quote hand of the separate studio assistants so what you're seeing here this is lighter here you see this is lighter that's darker that is not a degradation that is actually the choice of Matisse of different pieces of blue paper so the papers would be painted they'd be dried they'd be stored Matisse would ask for a color or many colors he would be given a choice and then he would choose we continue to learn even more about the color from a set of small painted paper swatches which date from the cutout period and represent the colors used by Matisse compiled by George Matisse and donated to MoMA by the Matisse family we know from contemporary Linnell color charts that gouache was produced in a wide range of colors so here is the sample set and on the left is samples provided to the Brody family for the Brody commission in Los Angeles it's interesting that George's set which tries to pull together all the different colors is much larger than what was sent to the Brody's Anna Martin's conservation scientist at MoMA has analyzed these samples over the past years her finding to be published when the analysis is complete shows that there is in fact a wide range although some samples which appear to differ differ only because of the application of gouache not chemical composition and such as the case with Matisse's blues which are uniformly ultramarine so these are all the same chemical composition in a july 23rd 1976 letter from Lydia de la Torcide to MoMA conservation she states these three elements the outline the composition and the tone of the gouache are the components of the original work they belong to the art of the painter and are sacred for the person performing the lining however if there is not a drawing or trace of charcoal the support the white background usually counts on paper is nothing sacred in itself by indicating the desired dimensions these forms backgrounds were cut by a workshop the hand of the artist did not participate in an extreme situation to replace it would not be a crime so that was part of the decision making process about replacing the white background or not areas of the blue swimming pool were just touched back with a little bit of in painting with colored pencil to knockback previous in painting which had happened at a I must say undisclosed time other than that no other change to the blue was taken place the ultimate remounting of the paper cut shapes and white freeze to the burlap was by far the most complicated but also the most interesting phase of the decision-making process the chemical incompatibility incompatibility between the new burlap and the new burlap is essentially as as acidic as the old burlap and the paper elements made an overall adhesive mounting a most unattractive alternative the curatorial conservation discussion of the importance of pins led to a decision to pin the work on to a new solid burlap covered support I made with the help of an assistant a full-scale pinned mock-up of one of the large panels and as conservators often do I consulted with many other conservators especially conservators dealing with methities cutouts about the idea of pinning instead of overall mounting so essentially I made a tracing of the original panel painted canceling paper blue cut them out bought new canceling paper and mounted it you can see that Lefebvre won a did a nicer job than I did because theirs was flat and mine was not and and then pinned this to the original panel that it came off of however the burly you you might ask the question is this the burlap it's not the burlap was actually stretched over linen so this is the secondary support but I used it the original pin holes through which the blue cut shape still exists and it was through these holes that I used for the re-pinning so I hope you can see there's a little pin there originally the white paper freeze would have been pinned to the studio wall but as this paper now has no pins I decided for the re-installation not to reintroduce any new holes where there were not necessary so originally there would have been holes against the original way in the original white paper because that's what kept it to the wall pinning returns to the work some of the three dimensionality and liveliness that a cutout must have had originally that this decision is by far the most radical of the whole procedure as no Matisse cutout has ever been removed from a mount and then subsequently pinned the new solid burlap supports covered mounts replicate the height of the dining room in the hotel Regina allowing the white paper freeze to be pinned at the original height this was one of my original goals especially as correspondence held in the MoMA archive between Pierre Matisse and Bill Rubin expressed the dissatisfaction regarding the height at which had been hung after the 1975 purchase so here you see an example of the way it used to be at MoMA and you can see that the height there is no person standing there but it's it's sort of a belly belly height for the Matisse cutout exhibition the swimming pool was installed in a room of the exact same dimension as the dining room at the hotel Regina in previous installations when entered through a doorway so I can just go back here you entered through this doorway you walked through it and then out another door in this new installation one enters and exits the room through one single doorway exactly the same size as it was originally and is surrounded by the cutouts women with monkeys in now in the collection of the Ludwig Museum but originally composed over the entry doorway was returned to this location for the cutout exhibition completing the original ensemble so we are presenting different parts of our research here our thinking evolved in tandem revelations about materials or architecture impacted our sense of the swimming pools operation effects and ambitions and investigations into how the swimming pool function fed decisions about its conservation and new presentation so out of our dialogue emerged a series of questions if the swimming pool is the culmination of Matisse's work in cut paper up until that point which is what we believed how did he get there and in the pool itself what were the key strategies he deployed I want to offer a few answers to these questions next which first requires a return to 1952 and then a deep dive into the pool itself so the year began with the commission for a stained glass on the theme of Christmas from the time life company I'm showing you that here soon after Matisse embarked on a project that turned out to be essential to the creation of the swimming pool his blue nudes now it should not be surprising to anyone here that Matisse would use cut paper to take on the subject of a seated female nude reducing his palate to focus intensely on the human form he labored for weeks on what came to be called blue nude number four that's what I'm showing you here beginning at first finishing it last and then and along the way recording the process in this series of photographs so with this what I would say is that though the sequence of photographs makes his efforts look kind of natural or easy so difficult was this process that Matisse briefly abandoned the nascent work but you can see that he moves from you know from something that was kind of very very bulky and then in one just to take one part of it kind of her waist ends up being you know closer to a point he moves the head and the thighs get slimmed out but he was so frustrated over the process that he that he abandons it and turns to his sketchbook as a kind of relief learning the form with pencil and pen drawing the figure over and over and over again he was soon able to cut the other three blue nudes with with mastery at least according to Lydia and finally finished the first one which is now called number four it's a little bit confusing so as opposed to building up the form with bits as he did in the one he started first but finished last that I'm showing you here for the other three he used a kind of different method and what he would do is he would slice into a sheet of paper and then separate the two sides so that the white below does the work of defining and you can really see how in in blue new number two all of that can kind of come back together and you can imagine it imagine it returning to the single sheet it was cut from um though Matisse's scissors only make contact with the blue paper he harnesses the physical sculptural and illuminative power of white now in the pool Matisse also does it has a kind of similar method he enlarges the white troughs that we've seen in the blue nudes lengthening and widening them until they have their own physical presence and you can see that in this work in a part like this where the kind of physical property of that white form comes forward and then in the works largest and most grandly sculptural body that's there um what he's done is he's um he's simply cut this sheet of paper um in in you know through half of it and slides the halves apart to create a female silhouette from the space between now the white does not work alone of course its tension with the blue is one of many around which the pool is organized positive and negative figure in ground limitation and expansion inside and outside up and down air and water animal and human parts and holes forms and inverses one of the pool strengths is its play with these terms the oscillation of seeing a figure from one perspective and ground from another air from one perspective and water from another body from one perspective and liquid from another and so on as we enter the room where are we the freezes above us and Matisse likely composed it seated so are we at the bottom of the pool looking up above the pool looking down are we treading water alongside the swimmers watching as their bodies cross in and out of the water all answers I think are equally valid um and it was um in some ways the many forms um that cutting yielded um that I mentioned earlier that made Matisse Matisse so uniquely able to see the possibilities and potentials of such visual flip-flopping the swimming pool swirls or really swims around the viewer generating a feeling of centerless circulation and immersion it turns out that as in the blue nudes Matisse thought through this dynamic in drawing sketches made in an ordinary day planner kindly shared with us um by George and Wanda um offer a key to the pool's abstraction and dynamism it was really exciting when when um when we got to see these on a sheet in the agenda dated July 20th that's that that's that um the sheet on the left side Matisse depicts a diving figure head down arm stretched out and tight against the head legs pushing off the ground in four similar drawings um as you go down the sheet um Matisse homes in on the arc formed when the spine curves over to dive but he also addresses the body's limbs and breasts reducing the female form to these features such reduction simplification the body condensed to arch breast and behind is seen in other works made that summer including of course the great acrobats in back bends that match arm to leg bulging head to tush these contortionists echo the the pools vaguely corporeal figures which similarly are all arch spine breasts and mermaid tail limbs in a second set of drawings um the spread on the right um Matisse makes a visual rhyme between body and wave Matisse explores two different curves a reverse c and an s um I think you can see that in those there um in relation to the female body a language swimmer moves horizontally across the left hand page one arm reaching out of the water the other stroking forward the entire body is a kind of serpentine line in another sketch the curve of the body mutates into a wave moving in the opposite direction and on the opposite page a figure of laws lazily in the water and the s shape of her body talking about that there um legs out bottom down left arm stretched is drawn in multiple configurations and kind of morphs into a curve a wave on a wing in each the forward tilt of of the diver the arch back and arm of the swimmer and the undulating curve of the lounger are abstract in in a set of repeated strokes creating watery waves the serpentine shape of the arabesque now the arabesque we know from Roger Benjamin and many other scholars is a key pictorial strategy for Matisse which he deployed from almost the very beginning of his career to create to create quote an abstract plastic and pictorial energy a consistent visual rhythm in Matisse's work the arabesque is also responsible for the pool's energy its dynamism and its force almost all the bodies whether human or fish are arched threading one to another produces an up and down curve that echoes the agendas shapes and waves a perfect meeting of compositional force and subject this up and down curve this wave drives the figures around the dining room or the pool propels the swimmers through the water without stopping giving the work a sense of endless circulation and limitless expansion the arabesque is the perfect sign for water which itself moves in undulating sinuous curves pushed by breezes or bodies in the agenda Matisse makes another reduction a symbolic shorthand for the swimming pool a double sign curve that's right there linking the arabesque to infinite expansion Matisse had long believed that the arabesque required containment in order to function dynamically famously arguing quote the arabesque is effective only when contained by the four sides of the picture with his support it has strength working primarily in the realm of the easel picture Matisse was perhaps resigned to amplification that happened in the imagination however the cutouts and specifically the play on the studio walls allowed Matisse to imagine a curve infinitely expanding without any frame Matisse articulated the arabesque's role and its formation on the wall as he saw it in parakeet and mermaid an installation shot here on the wall as you can see it goes around the corner and Matisse says look at this large composition the foliage fruits scissors a garden the intermediary white is determined by the arabesque of the colored cut paper that gives this ambient white a rare and intangible quality i just want to remind you of what the work looks like um now um laid out so liberated by the wall Matisse's arabesque is a force propelling a continuous circular movement a continuous circular movement without center and without end finally fulfilling his aspiration to create space that extends as far as my imagination now given the swimming post pictorial and metaphoric chain of body arc arabesque wave i want to finish by looking closely at what seems to be the simplest of cutouts and really one of my favorites this is the one i would take home a work from the same blue and white moment in 1952 called the wave an echo of the sinuous swimmer wave sign curve in Matisse's agenda the wave is really the apotheosis of this moment in Matisse's production and an emblem of his cutout practice as a whole made by cutting a curve into a rectangular blue sheet dividing it in half and sliding the two resulting sides apart to reveal the white not so much below it but equivalent to it the work simple power derives from the tension Matisse creates between blue and white positive and negative flatness and depth though it is small and it is it is pretty small size compared to something like the parakeet and and mermaid it refers to limitlessness the infinite expansion to which Matisse had always aspired though this expansion seems to be lateral it should be noted that Matisse tried out the wave as a in a vertical orientation that's right here a kind of paper equivalent to brand cruises endless column as an abstraction of water and body and as a perfect reflection of the arabesque or serpentine line the wave demonstrates with absolute directness the cutout's economy of means while its subject coincides perfectly with its material condition the endlessly rolling fluid repetition of waves in its representation of infinity as a sign for expansion it also stands for potentiality from Matisse in 1952 possibility the the lexicon of cut paper proliferated unbounded across the studio walls thanks very much