03/09/2026
Opening tomorrow night - a superb range of original works on paper by Henri Matisse are included in our School of Paris exhibition, Tête à Tête.
DM for information.
During his lifetime, Matisse had several periods of concentrated activity in which he explored printmaking and during which the different printmaking media became his primary form of expression. In the late 1920s and early 1930s etching and lithography predominated. It was not until 1938, as he searched for the ever greater economy of line, that he turned to linocuts, and it was only in the last years of his life that aquatints became prevalent.
Matisse’s first print was made in 1900 and his last in 1952. The exhibition at David Simon Contemporary includes etchings from the 1920s through to lithographs from 1938 - the 1950s.
Using an increasingly simplified line, Matisse created a series of intimate portraits of friends and female models.
