 Thank you, Tom, and thank you. Is this volume okay? Thanks to everybody here at the Barnes, to Suvi, to William Palombo, to Eva Lan, for the publication, this occasion. I really want to say that this is, it's a real privilege to be here. The papers have been so interesting, so absorbing, and anybody's that all like me, you've all learned a lot, because I certainly have all have learned a great deal. The paper I'm going to give is a very interesting and unintended compliment to Jody Hauptmann's and Karl Buckberg's paper from earlier today. They didn't intend it, I might have intended a little bit more, but it presents two sides of some of the same material. Their emphasis was on process, and that was very much a theme this morning, and my emphasis is on process too, but really quite a different kind of process. To open, my reference points are two exhibitions of Matisse's paper cutouts, the first held in Washington, D.C., Detroit, and St. Louis in 1977-78, the second in London and New York in 2014-15. Many of you will recognize that my title refers to John Neff's essay, Matisse, His Cutouts, and the Ultimate Method, in the catalog of the earlier exhibition. At first, this wide-ranging text appears to suggest that in developing the procedure of cutting shapes from colored paper and arranging them on a uniformed surface, the artist had fulfilled a long-standing quest to reconcile the separate media from which he made his art. Matisse himself expressed this goal in his interview with Pierre Crouton in 1941 as Finding an Ultimate Method. In this light, the cutouts could be understood, and here I quote Neff, as a synthesis not only of painting, drawing, and sculpture, but of Matisse's career as a whole. Neff went on to write that the evident continuities in Matisse's work over an entire career meant that the artist always had the impulse toward the cutout within him, from paintings of the Fove period right through to his final efforts. This idea of the cutouts as the culmination of decades-long concerns is a well-established way of thinking about these extraordinary works on paper. But at the end of his essay, Neff makes a sharp turn, emphasizing the role of many of Matisse's largest cutouts as maquettes for ceramic tile murals or stained glass windows. Neff suggests that the importance of such cutouts was as a means to something else, more than as ends in themselves. The ends Matisse sought included large-scale environmental decorations whose ambient effects would be beneficial to the viewer. Matisse himself believed such decorative considerations to be, as he put it, an essential quality of art. Neff then concluded with a flourish asserting that the cutouts were not an ultimate method, not a combination, but a beginning of something grander, something more immersive and life-enhancing than the cutouts alone promised. And this is where I begin today. Some of you here participated in the extremely stimulating Scholars Day at the Museum of Modern Art in Fall 2014, convened by Karl Buckberg and Jodi Hauptmann and held in the galleries of the exhibition organized by Tate and MoMA. There I offered a friendly challenge to a key premise of the exhibition. This thrilling show and its scrupulously researched catalog presented a coherent and forceful thesis about Matisse's cutouts, emphasizing his materials and processes. The avowed purpose was, to quote from the catalog now, to show Matisse's distinctive approach, the process by which the works were physically constructed in the studio and the groundbreaking implications of his methods of cutting, pinning, and composing on the wall. You heard much about that earlier today. A specific feature of the show's thesis, echoed in the catalog essays, was to stress the provisional character of the cutouts. The organizers emphasized the idea that the cutouts in Matisse's studio were being continually pinned and repinned, maintaining, as they put it, a state of perpetual deferral that implied infinite creative possibility. One of the curators contrasted Matisse's highly personal contingent approach to the typical goal of artists, which is to aim for finality and finish. But I would claim that for Matisse, the point was precisely, ultimately, to fix the largest of his decorative compositions, to render them permanent, even if this intention usually ended up giving way to more powerful forces, as we will see later in this talk. When we consider the late decorative projects, for which Matisse used paper cutouts as a design medium, there is no question that he strove for finality and finish, but in other, more durable, usually architectural materials. Often architectural materials. As a corollary, I strive to recover something of the original status of some of Matisse's admired late paper cutouts as maquettes, or concepts, or designs. So I would like to turn our attention to Matisse's thinking with respect to a high percentage of the largest and most impressive of the paper cutouts as proposals to be realized in architectural materials, notably stained glass and ceramic tile, but also such fabrics as wool tapestry, linen, and silk. In the letter to Alfred Barr of MoMA in 1954, Matisse himself used the phrase ultimate materials to designate the goal of the design process. In this letter, and I swear, Matisse established this idea of the cutout as a maquette made in the service of an ultimate realization in other materials. Writing 18 months earlier, also to Barr, Matisse had been more expansive. You will agree with me that a maquette for a stained glass window and the window itself are like a musical score and its performance by an orchestra. Taking the score performance analogy a little further, Matisse advocated against exhibiting a cutout design and its ultimate realization together. He argued this in the following terms. The maquette is only an indication, and it is quite obvious that the idea of the ultimate material doesn't leave the artist's mind when he makes the maquette, just as the musician understands his instruments when he writes his score on the paper. And to continue with my musical example, this is still Matisse. I would say that the maquette remains as the written score, whereas the final work becomes this very score performed by an orchestra. And he continues, if some informed visitors get this, others may be misled and may look on the difference between the two panels as a mistake in execution. And keep that concept in mind. As Matisse emphasized, the necessary conceptual link between a cutout design and its execution in the ultimate materials is important, but so are the separate visual qualities of each part of the design process. Yet the cutout in this analogy is the necessary step toward the more important goal of the final performance. As we will see, the score performance analogy has intriguing implications for a consideration of a cutout as a design or a potential design for the creation of an artwork by Matisse that the artist never touched and in some cases never even saw. To be clear here at the outset, I'm not arguing, as so many others have done, for the inferiority of such decorations in permanent materials to the cutouts through which they were conceived. I'm hopeful that I may, however, complicate the status of the cutouts in productive ways so that we may find that to consider them first and foremost as original artworks makes the cutouts less interesting than they really are. Therefore I want to argue for the fixed over the provisional, for the destination of decoration over the generative context of the artist's studio, for the hybrid nature of many of the grandest and most important of Matisse's paper cutouts, and finally for an ontology of the cutouts in which they are at once art and design, except when they cannot be both of these things at once. The cutout on the left is generally said to be the last artwork Matisse made. It's a design for a stained glass window destined for the Rockefeller family chapel in Westchester County, New York. And by the way, I was married under that window. Long time ago. The artist died before the window was fabricated. The Rockefeller rules window may have been Matisse's final design, but it was not the last one to be fabricated in the ultimate materials. Although it was subject to the usual delays, the completion of the Rockefeller commission was unproblematic. The intention of the work was clear. Matisse had finished his design and specified the qualities and colors of the glass, and everything had the approval of the patron. What remained was to carry out the well-defined wishes of both parties, and this was done successfully. Happy end. Several other Matisse cutout designs were fulfilled posthumously, others were fulfilled posthumously, but for reasons and settings different from what was originally intended. Design moves on, but these cases are required or invited other parties to stand in for the artist and interpret his desires. Any interpretation of these desires, however faithful to a perceived intention, unavoidably requires that decisions be made by others on the artist's behalf, and even judgments about whether or not a given paper cutout was intended as a design for a specific purpose. It's helpful to understand first an example of a judgment against a particular attempted use of one of Matisse's designs in the artist's absence, which pointedly focused the status of a design. Then I will offer a few examples of successful fulfillments of design in permanent materials. First let's go back to 1949, and Matisse is commissioned from a carpet manufacturer in Yonkers, New York for a design to be set in repeat for a carpet intended as floor covering as opposed to an area rug or accent rug. After some initial misunderstandings, the Alexander Smith Company ultimately fabricated not a carpet, but a limited edition accent rug based on Matisse's design. This is what you see on the right. So to make a long story short, after some tribulations, happy end, except this was not the end. Less than six weeks after Matisse's death in early November 1954, William Brown of Alexander Smith, Inc., wrote to the artist's son, the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse, who had been the go-between for the artist and the Smith Company. Brown reminded Pierre Matisse that the original project, over five years earlier, had been for a carpet with a design in repeat. He went on to inform Pierre Matisse that the firm now planned to go ahead with that original intent. In addition, the company wanted to produce a series of what they called limited edition broad loom carpets in each of the original colors of mimosa, the colors you see here, though pointedly not employing the design. The latter carpet plan was based, Brown alleged, on an oral understanding between Brown and the artist during their original discussions. These Matisse colors, this is what Brown called them, Matisse colors carpets would be marketed as progeny of Matisse's design with an example of the earlier accent rug mimosa as the link to the artist's actual work. The archive does not contain a reply to these commercial aggressions, but since the Alexander Smith Company did not bring any new Matisse carpet project to production, whether in a single color or with the original design in repeat, it may be supposed that Pierre Matisse, understandably, did not give his approval. Here the artist, Dr. Morale, has moral right in the design and its adherence in Matisse's descendant and agent triumphed over the force of business. This outcome marked a faithfulness on the part of the artist's representatives to Matisse's original intent that has, when tested, which is apparently frequently, that has extended more recently to a rejection by the artist's state to the placement of his designs on everything from cell phone cases to beach towels. This exemplary vigilance with respect to the design and marketing potential of Matisse's often visually seductive motifs is compelled by an unintended side effect of his fecundity and the popularity of his paper cutouts. The fitness of the cutouts for reproduction in a range of materials and for mass consumption is an unavoidable implication of the way in which he approached design at the end of his career. After his death, Matisse's descendants oversaw the fabrication of selected designs directly in advance of major exhibitions of his work, with the clear intention to highlight these less known but important aspects of his late activity. These decorations were made for something other than their original purpose. A canthus, which you see at left, was executed in ceramic by Charles Cox for the posthumous Matisse retrospective at the Mzénazina d'Archmodène in Paris in 1956 where it was the unique representative of this aspect of the artist's work. For the same exhibition, Marguerite Dutui, Matisse's daughter, arranged for the master glass maker Paule Bounie to fabricate ivy and flower, which you see at the right, the window originally intended for the mausoleum of Albert and Mary Lasker of New York. For the even more important retrospective in 1970 at the Grand Palais in Paris, Wild Papis, also executed by Paule Bounie, represented achievements in stained glass, and the ceramic canthus was also shown on that occasion. In these three cases, the artist's family relied on the experience and expertise of Matisse's trusted artisans to achieve a result as close to the artist wishes as possible. These outcomes, especially ivy and flower and a canthus, are compelling and beautiful aspects, examples rather, of Matisse's ability to design for these materials over large surfaces, as well as testaments to the craft skills and judgment of his habitual fabricators. For the sometimes uncertain territory of these posthumous realizations, there was a guide. In 1958, the publisher Terriade devoted a special double issue of his journal Verve to Matisse's late work, highlighting cutouts he made in the last five years of his life. For understandable practical reasons, most exhibitions that included Matisse's late work featured many small paper cutouts and a handful of larger examples. The Verve issue, by contrast, is conspicuously devoted to Matisse's large-scale cutouts. Of the 31 cutouts, all illustrated in color plates, 22 measured over six feet on at least one side, at least six feet on one side, and a further four were over five feet in one dimension. Compiled with the cooperation of Matisse's children, this issue of Verve functions, moreover, as a de facto authority for which cutouts were designed for decorations. There are 12 of these. All the completed projects are represented by their associate cutout designs in the issue of Verve and in its list. These nine works are labeled either, sorry, either design for stained glass window or design for wall ceramic. Two designs for ceramic that have never been fabricated are Matisse's first two enormous cutouts for the Brody patio commission, here called decoration masks and decoration fruits. That makes 11 maquettes. I'll discuss the 12th case in a few minutes. First, some assessment of the artistic status of Matisse's works in cut paper is necessary when considering their authority as designs. What are Matisse's paper cutouts? A question that was asked earlier. The simple answer, of course, is that they are artworks. When Matisse made them, this was not universally accepted. For instance, the art critic and publisher Christian Zervos, we heard about him a little bit earlier, who was usually sympathetic to the artist, mocked them as an agreeable distraction which would ease his long hours of insomnia. The writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteur was initially condescending. Matisse cuts up paper and colors images like a good child in bed with scarlet fever. Now, of course, there is consensus that the cutouts are artworks of a special and innovative kind. It is true that Matisse began using the method of coloring paper and cutting out shapes as an expedient for making artworks in other media, as we've seen with dance, for instance. But in the period of his most concentrated use of the scissors technique, 1946 to 1954, he also began to regard its direct products as finished works of art, worthy of exhibition on the same terms as his work in other media. Two exhibitions he supervised closely will serve as examples. In the catalog of his show of recent works, or 1947-48, at the, again, the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, held in 1949, the Papiers des Coupées, as they were called, appeared first and were more numerous than drawings and paintings, drawings or paintings. Significantly, the latter, paintings, were qualified as peintures à l'huile or paintings. This exhibition also included two of his cartoons for tapestries. Soon after, within the mini retrospective of Matisse's work held at the Maison de la Pensee Française, poster on the right, in 1950, in Paris, three cutouts, each well over a meter in the shorter dimension, were included in the peinture section, the painting section, and were distinguished from other paintings in the catalog only by the single word gouache. There were also the three most recent paintings of peinture in the exhibition, which seemed intended to show that the cutouts were continuous with Matisse's earlier production in oils. At the same time, as we've seen, Matisse certainly also regarded some of them as design tools, even in analogy to painting practice, calling a cutout esquisse. And he said this in reference to Christmas Eve, the stained glass window you see here, along with its cutout, both in the collection of MoMA. The cutouts were indispensable for designing on the large scale to which his ambition led him late in his career, and at one point he asked rhetorically, and one might imagine with mock exasperation, why didn't I think of this sooner? A distinction between the conceptual and the physical in Matisse's art, between meaning and expression, is often made. The cutout could be called a concept. The final product in the ultimate materials is the expression of the concept. Fitting with the square performance analogy, Matisse repeated several times in this period. But this still bugs the question, what did he create with paper and scissors? Under French law, when Matisse made these cutout designs, there was no concept of an original idea in the visual arts. Legally speaking, all creative works, whether literary, visual, or musical, had three components. Idea, composition, and expression. Works of literature, according to the same law, were founded on ideas of the writer's invention. By contrast, a work of visual art was based on a donne visuelle, a visual fact, which the artist extracted from the world or from memory. Under the law, these visual facts were available to everyone. So there could be no doig d'auteur, no author's rights with respect to the genesis, the idea of an artwork. Under the second and third components, the composition and the ultimate expression of the idea had the protection of the doig d'auteur. And the composition was in a tenuous position with respect to these rights. It could only be considered an artwork in oeuvre. Once the commonly available visual fact had been given what the law called a concrete representation. And here I'm quoting, and I'll continue to quote an expert on French intellectual property law, a man named Henri de Bois. That is to say, the composition is not intrinsically an artwork and becomes one only once it is given expression. And this affects the protection of the composition. For an artwork, the originality of the composition can't be protected before it's fulfillment in the ultimate materials by the artist. We can speak of an original artwork only once the process has reached the stage of the fullest realization of the artist's intention. The stage of, quoting de Bois again, expression, that is, execution. And more clearly from de Bois, the idea isn't taken into account. The composition as such can no more be taken into consideration. It is only the intellectual performance, the représentation intellectuelle, the subjective prefiguration of the future work. Finally, still de Bois, the composition will qualify as an artwork only after its realization, of which it then becomes an integral part. These categories accord with the distinction made earlier in this paper between the conceptual and physical components of an artwork. In this legal framework, a musical score is the composition, the performance, the expression. And the score cannot attain the status of a work of music until and unless it is performed. As we've seen, Matisse used the score orchestral performance analogy several times to describe the relationship between design and its fulfillment. On this model, Matisse's cut-out designs are compositions, but they achieve their fulfillment as artworks only through their expression, which is to say their translation into the intended, the ultimate materials. But reasonable observers would not deny that, say, large decoration with masks, which we see here, an unfulfilled, so to speak, cut-out design. Reasonable observers would not deny that it is an artwork. Intellectual property law may be behind the curve on the artistic status of such a creation. Just as U.S. customs regulations in 1928 were incapable of granting entry into the United States of a polished bronze version of Brancusi's bird in space as an artwork because it might have been mistaken for some finely machined industrial object. But how can the abstract nature of the law govern whether something is or is not an artwork in a tumultuous period in which established artistic categories were routinely under attack? It is part of the purpose of the law to define, it is part of the purpose of modern art, to challenge definition. Therefore, a more complete answer to the question of the cut-out status and one truer to Matisse's intentions is that potentially they can be both art and design. A cut-out may be simultaneously a maquette or design for an artwork and an artwork in itself independent of the ultimate resolution or destination of the design. Such a duality in some of Matisse's largest and most significant paper cut-outs seems unproblematic. But what if some circumstance forced a choice? Under what conditions would it be imperative to identify a cut-out as either an artwork or a design for an artwork? Such a circumstance may be found in the mundane but essential arena in modern art collecting and exhibition practice that was Brancusi's Waterloo, and that arena is international shipping and customs clearance. For Matisse's American clients, as well as for Pierre Matisse, who represented his father, so ably, the costs and stresses of international art transport loomed large at two principal stages in the evolution of a decorative commission. First, at the point when a client in the US needed to see and approve a design sent from France. And second, when the completed decoration, whose components were fabricated in France but assembled and installed at its destination, was ready to be delivered to the client. How Matisse and his agents identified cut-out designs when they left France to pass through US customs on entry into the US had an impact on the amount of duty assessed and might also result in costly and frustrating delays if there were any inconsistency. It was standard and natural business practice to try to minimize the cost and streamline the entry of goods, artistic and otherwise, into the US. How this was done with respect to Matisse's cut-out designs and their expression in the ultimate materials, first them into the realm of legal definition. Depending on the context and the particular moment in the artistic process, Matisse and his son designated the components of the design process as different orders of objects, from maquette to original art to reproduction. How these collaborators construed the ontology of the cut-outs depended on whether they were being presented to a public as in an exhibition to customs officials at a moment of international transfer requiring an unambiguous label of identity or to clients who might commission the proposed final decoration in ceramic or glass. It's helpful to understand how Pierre Matisse and Henri Matisse thought about the cut-outs for the Brody patio and the Lasker mausoleum in light of these distinctions between various categories. Pierre Matisse instructed his father not to label the maquette for the Lasker window, Ivy and Flower, which you see on the right, not to label it as a maquette or as anything connected to a design process. Rather, Matisse was to identify the cut-out as an original work in Oroflou, which it also was in their eyes and would soon be in the eyes of the wall. Furthermore, the artist needed to give it a title, any title. Giving the cut-out a title is what allowed it to be declared as an artwork, which would be admitted to the U.S. at a lower rate of duty than if it were declared as a design, which would have had commercial implications. As in the case of Brancusi v. United States, the process of design had unwanted industrial associations that carried over into the legal area of customs declaration, greatly complicating international art trade. Moreover, Pierre Matisse insisted that if asked, his father should deny that he was designing decorations. This was intended to avoid problems with the clients, but Pierre also meant to keep the artist straight about how his work for decoration should be presented in a public setting. When he had visitors to his studio, Matisse didn't understand why we have to hide the panels referring to the cut-outs that were intended for decorations. He was eager to have an audience for his designs for decorations, and he sought to exhibit both the Brody and Lasker maquettes in Paris before the commissions were secured by contracts. In other words, Matisse wished these compositions to be seen as examples of his recent work in and of themselves, but without excluding their function as maquettes for decorations. The implication that one of his compositions could simultaneously be designed at an artwork did not disturb the artist, but such complications did make Pierre Matisse, who had to deal with them on the ground, as it were, anxious. Similarly, Pierre called the Brody cut-out, the sheaf, which you see on the left, the original work, but advised his father that he could give exceptional authorization to have this original artwork reproduced in Pierre Matisse's word for no more than the fabrication cost of the ceramic. In other words, the status of the ceramic, which was the value-added goal of the enterprise, was strategically reduced for the client's benefit. The Brody's would buy the finished ceramic as a decorative work at a reduced value because, in Pierre Matisse's words, finally it is only a reproduction. By contrast, for customs purposes, Pierre later instructed his father's agents in France to declare the finished product as an original ceramic to lower the duty. These variants, this naming and renaming, this designing and reproducing, had the unintended effect of disturbing a conception of originality that was largely sustained within the critical discourse and market practices of the time. Matisse's creation of these cut-out designs and their subsequent legal and ontological fluidity resisted unilateral definition. Rather than fixing their meaning, insisting only on their originality and their singular status as artworks, we should consider the potential contribution Matisse's cut-out designs for decorations, as well as the final decorations themselves, the contribution these make to the destabilizing enterprise of modernism. The veriflist may not be an infallible guide. In another context, Matisse did refer explicitly to his large cut-out, the parakeet and the mermaid, as a cartoon for a mural decoration. This, one of Matisse's most beguiling large-scale compositions, would have made a stunning ceramic wall, but there was no other indication that he envisioned that outcome, nor is the cut-out identified in the veriflist as a maquette. There is one item in the veriflist, labeled like others as a design for wall ceramic, that Matisse may not have intended as a maquette at the moment of its origin in his dining room in the Hotel Regina. In 1952, he made the cut-out the swimming pool, which you've now seen several times, his largest artwork with the exception of the bar and stance. Right here. He told several observers, as you know, that he made it for himself and for a specific purpose. Like other visitors, Jean Cocteur reported a version of the artist's explanation. Went to see Matisse. I find him in bed in the north room. The room is surrounded by paper cut-out frescoes representing blue women diving. Matisse says, I can't go to the seashore anymore, so I manage here as best I can. This enveloping cut-out was compensatory, an alternative to an experience and an aid to pleasurable memory. In an obvious sense, it was the most environmental single artwork of his career, wrapping around an entire room in his apartment, substituting for the bathing he loved, but could no longer enjoy himself. It is one of the best examples of the immersive potential of Matisse's decorative compositions, and it was satisfying to see it as restored by Karl Buckberg and his team at MoMA to something like its original freshness. However, although everyone associated with this exceptional artwork asserted at the time that Matisse made it for himself, without a thought of an ultimate translation into another material, the swimming pool does appear on the verve list of the authorised design for a ceramic composition. Subsequently, Matisse's descendants commissioned the fabrication of not one, but two ceramic tile murals based on this cut-out. This kind of multiple execution of a design had precedence, and Matisse's contracts, as with the Brody's and the Laskers, sometimes made this possibility explicit. Although the prospect of such fabrication of a ceramic mural swimming pool was perhaps always a theoretical possibility, the act of it complicated the status of MoMA's paper cut-out. It was no longer a potential design in addition to being an original artwork. If it was a design at all, it was a design whose function had been fulfilled. Now to conclude, nearly all of Matisse's late decorations have by now been removed from their original locations, extracting them from the ambience that prompted their genesis. Even the largest and most architecturally integrated of these artworks, the barn's dance, was subject to powerful cultural and economic forces that relocated it from its suburban art school setting to this downtown Philadelphia museum. Almost the only places where Matisse's late decorations may now be found in their intended settings are in chapels, advance, assi, and pocanteco hills. Otherwise, most of them are in art museums, as are the paper cut-outs that the artist made as their designs. Others are destined to follow. The museum rules as the lowest common denominator. Ultimately, only churches may resist the entropic pull of the museum as the ultimate resting place for these decorations. When the poet and novelist Louis Alagon, with good nature but pointed meaning, vowed to convert the Vence Chapel into a dance hall when his Communist Party came into power in France, Matisse responded that he had anticipated this possibility. At his direction, the chapel would be protected by conversion to a Montemouisturique. It would become its own museum. That day seems unlikely now, but while decoration and the purposes and pleasures of life that it may express are essential, they may not last forever.