With more than 200 works and documents from the rich Matissian collection of the Musée national d'art moderne as well as from major national and international collections, this exhibition retraces the artist's career in chronological order, from his beginnings around 1890 to his contact with the masters, during which he gradually developed his own pictorial language until the early 1950s.

The exhibition catalogue borrows the codes of the edition of Henri Matisse, a novel by Louis Aragon, and is based on five essays and an extensive chronology / anthology illustrated and enriched with numerous quotations and unpublished documents, in order to "build the novel" of the painter Matisse and his work, in the manner of a biography. The monograph is completed by a small booklet of reproductions from the magazine Verve, to which the artist actively contributed.