Nice exhibition brings Matisse and Yves Saint Laurent into artistic dialogue

The show, titled “Beauty, fashion and happiness”, is on display until September 28 at the Musée Matisse. It brings together around 160 works, ranging from paintings and sketches to haute couture dresses, jewellery and textiles. The idea, according to the museum, is to explore how Saint Laurent read Matisse, and how fashion and fabric may have played a deeper role in Matisse’s own practice than is often assumed.

Curators say the project grew out of research into the painter’s relationship with fashion, but also from tracing the more or less direct references to Matisse in Saint Laurent’s designs over decades. For Yves Saint Laurent, Matisse was described as a kind of “aesthetic ghost”, a recurring presence in his creative imagination. Pierre Bergé and Saint Laurent themselves owned a significant collection of Matisse works and books, something curators point to as part of an ongoing dialogue rather than occasional inspiration.

Some of the connections are subtle, almost embedded in texture and rhythm. Motifs from Matisse’s cut-out gouaches reappear in the patterns and colour blocks of Saint Laurent dresses, while compositions such as the 1937 painting “Purple Robe and Anemones” are echoed in later garments, including a 1988 cape that seems to extend the painting into fabric.

Other references are more direct. A 1936 portrait by Matisse was reproduced on a handbag in 1983, a transfer so literal that it required formal agreements with rights holders. The exhibition treats these moments less as appropriation and more as a structured conversation between painting and couture.

The curators also highlight the reverse influence: fashion and textile thinking already present in Matisse’s work. The painter, who designed costumes for ballet and worked closely with material and surface, is shown experimenting with colour as something almost tactile. At one point he used a fabric in a specific shade of blue that later appeared in his painting “Blue Robe Reflected in the Mirror”, itself echoed decades later in a Saint Laurent evening dress from 1981.

Aymeric Jeudy, director of the museum, describes Matisse’s approach to cut-outs as an act of “cutting into material”, where colour becomes something constructed rather than applied. “It is about finding the colour, shaping it and making an architecture out of it,” he said. “An architecture for painting in Matisse’s case; an architecture of clothing, in motion for Saint Laurent.”

Serena Bucalo-Mussely, co-curator of the exhibition, said Saint Laurent consistently returned to Matisse throughout his career, seeing him as one of those figures who quietly accompanied his creative process. The references, she noted, move between citation and transformation, sometimes barely visible, sometimes fully explicit.

French and European cultural press have largely framed the exhibition as one of the summer highlights on the Côte d’Azur, praising both its scale and its balance between accessibility and scholarship. Reviews have pointed to its thematic structure, which moves through colour, line, movement and body, with drawing presented as the shared foundation between painter and designer.

The exhibition runs through late September, positioned in Nice as a seasonal anchor for visitors moving through the Riviera’s cultural circuit, where art, fashion and tourism often overlap without clear boundaries.