Musée Matisse Nice pairs Henri Matisse and Alex Katz in landmark dialogue exhibition
Alex Katz, 10 AM, 1959. Oil on linen, 186 × 171.5 cm. Courtesy: Alex Katz Studio. Photo: Paul Takeuchi. © Alex Katz / Adagp, Paris, 2026.
NICE.—
Every autumn, the Musée Matisse Nice explores contemporary perceptions of the work of Henri Matisse (1869–1954). This year, it is hosting a temporary exhibition dedicated to Alex Katz (born in 1927), a leading figure in American painting.
The encounter between Henri Matisse and Alex Katz forms part of a vast cultural history linking France and the United States. Henri Matisse’s work was exhibited across the Atlantic from 1908 onwards and played a part in introducing the American public to the most avant-garde developments in European art.
In February 1949, Alex Katz came across an exhibition at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York, which was dedicated to his father’s recent works. The paintings known as the “Intérieurs de Vence” (Interiors of Vence)—including Nature morte aux grenades (Still Life with Pomegranates) and Le silence habité des maisons (The Inhabited Silence of Houses)—along with the brush drawings and cut-outs, had a profound aesthetic impact on the young artist, who was then a student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.
Alex Katz – a painter of everyday American life—has been studying the work of the French master ever since. Seventy-five years later, the idea for the exhibition arose following Katz’s encounter with the museum’s collections in 2024 and the fruitful dialogue that ensued. Designed in collaboration with the artist himself, “Henri Matisse – Alex Katz. The Silence of Painting” offers a new display of the museum’s collections, in which Alex Katz’s works resonate with those of Henri Matisse.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Alex Katz lives and works in New York and Maine. From the very start of his career, he developed a distinctive style of painting that is difficult to categorise within the art movements of his time in the United States. The traditional genres of figurative painting—floral still lifes, landscapes and the human figure—became the main subjects of his work at a time when Abstract Expressionism was dominating the American art scene. A painter of the present day, capturing the moment and transposing it onto canvas, Alex Katz, like his predecessor, is interested in dance, fashion and cinema. His painting is not naturalistic: nature is stylised, reworked and transformed in the studio. He shares with Matisse a pictorial vocabulary based on the simplification of forms and a marked economy of means.
Thanks to its broad chronological scope, the exhibition offers visitors the chance to explore Alex Katz’s body of work, from his earliest pieces (Nude, 1951) to his most recent works (Lilies 13, 2025). Paintings, drawings, collages and prints from the artist’s studio invite the public to revisit the museum’s collections—which themselves originate from Matisse’s studio—through a contemporary lens, and highlight the enduring relevance of his work.
