by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Matisse’s Cut-outs: Time Running Out


“I will get out of my head seeing that Matisse chapel in Vence,” Flannery O'Connor told her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in 1958.   A pious cousin had arranged for her to join a pilgrimage of Georgia Catholics to Rome and Lourdes (the latter in the hope of a miracle cure for O'Connor’s lupus).   O'Connor had other aspirations for the trip: “The one thing in France I have a real desire to see is Matisse’s chapel in Vence; but of course they won’t be going anywhere near suchlike as that …”

That’s the way I’ve felt all fall, going around New York with the knowledge that Matisse’s cut-outs are on view at the Museum of Modern Art — and with the knowledge that, likely as not, I won’t be going anywhere near suchlike as that.   And that’s the way I feel just now, learning that MoMA is going to stay open round the clock through 5:30 Sunday to enable us laggards to see the cutouts – and knowing that, likely as not, I’ll not get there anyhow.  

What is it that has kept me from clearing an hour in a busy season – of soccer games, basketball games, skiing, and the circus; of restaurant nights out; of movies and long-form television, of live rock-and-roll and live Bach, of pocket exhibitions about St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton – what has kept me from clearing an hour to see one of the great works of art of recent times?  

It’s the high cost of MoMA: admission $25, with no discounts for families or children old enough to walk and talk (the admission is being cut in half during the overnights).  

It’s the museum’s still-strange hours: closed at 5:30 weekdays like a cobbler’s, closed Wednesdays, open late Friday and Saturday evenings – great for a date, not so great for a family outing.

It’s the thought that the cut-outs show is so fundamental that it would be wrong to go to it solo, without my wife or our children: better not to go at all than to leave them out.  

It’s the impression I’ve got – wrong, maybe, still very strong, I’d say – that the Museum of Modern Art is a museum for adults, for French and Japanese tourists and glamorous people wearing clothes that aspire to be art, and that it isn’t a welcome place for a home-school outing or for middle-schoolers who don’t yet bend the knee to line and color and significant form.  

It’s the very lightness of the cut-outs: surely I would make time for a similar exhibit of Da Vinci drawings or late Rembrandt self-portraits.

It’s the high cost of MoMA, fed through the expectation that the price of culture (unlike sports, or good cooking) should be nil or nominal.

It’s all those things: but behind them, or beneath them, it’s the vague recollection that all this already happened: that I rushed to see Matisse “once and for all” once before, when the Matisse retrospective – one of the first contemporary museum blockbusters – was held at MoMA in 1992.  

I saw the cut-outs in that show, didn’t I?  I saw them.  I did.  I know I did.  I am sure I did.

Strange to think that a blockbuster show can create such an aura around the artist and the event that we can be left doubting our own visual memories of the actual works of art.    

Why am I not rushing to the cut-outs, rushing to seize the reprieve of the final weekend?   I’m not proud to say so, but it’s because I’ve seen them before.

Hoping to get to Matisse’s chapel in Vence before my time runs out.