Henri Matisse – Yves Saint Laurent. Beauty, Fashion and Happiness. Even before seeing it, we were already captivated by the title of this major exhibition exploring the artistic resonances between the work of Henri Matisse and Yves Saint Laurent. These two brilliant 20th-century innovators of form, who never met, both took their creative practice far beyond the established realms of painting and fashion, blurring the boundaries between fine and applied arts. Yet their affinities run deeper and are more surprising still. Bringing together 160 works, this richly researched exhibition, conceived by Musée Matisse Nice and Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, reveals these connections in a way that is both scholarly and accessible.
Paintings, drawings, paper cut-outs, textiles, archives and haute couture silhouettes: these juxtapositions reveal a shared fascination with colour, light, pattern and the body. For Matisse, a passionate collector of fabrics, textiles became a true field of pictorial experimentation. For Saint Laurent, painting moved from two dimensions into three, while clothing became art in motion. Dresses and paintings, sketches and drawings, patterns and paper cut-outs echo one another, revealing the same freedom of line and colour and, above all, the same desire to break free from established conventions.
→ Henri Matisse – Yves Saint Laurent. Beauty, Fashion and Happiness, until 28 September 2026, Musée Matisse Nice.