The Tate Modern are currently staging a fantastic exhibition of work from later in Henri Matisse’s later life – his Cut Out era.
Some of the works are really quite amazing, from the classic Matisse use of colour, through to the sheer scale of the work, filling whole walls.
The exhibition culminates in the famous collaboration with glass craftsman Paul Bony, “Nuit de Noel”, or “Christmas Eve” to you and I.
However, having slowly unwrapped this “present”, layer on layer through the previous galleries, this amazing piece of art felt like an anti-climax, sat in it’s darkened room, with it’s one-dimensional backlighting.
It certainly wasn’t how Matisse must have imagined it: to be constantly changing due to the vagaries of natural light, and the way that it should cast it’s coloured patterns back into the room.
I wonder why the Tate didn’t try to exhibit Nuit de Noel with some sort of intelligent and programmable LED backlight that can emulate natural light, and how the light source would move with the day and with the seasons?
Nuit de Noel was originally commissioned by Time magazine to be put in it’s reception at Rockerfeller Centre. Would it have been lit by the low winter sun, shining down the “alleyways” of Manhattan skyscrapers? Surely we can make that happen with modern technology?
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