'HENRI MATISSE - A CUT ABOVE THE REST' Film Premieres on BBC World News, Now thru 4/25

The MATISSE cut-outs -- once called "paper jokes" by a critic -- have since been celebrated as a bold and colorful vision that helped change the course of art in the late 20th-century. A new TV documentary premiering in the U.S. Saturday (4/19) is a terrific tie-in to the major new exhibit opening this weekend in London and coming to NYC this fall, presented by the Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art.

THE CULTURE SHOW: "HENRI MATISSE - A CUT ABOVE THE REST" film premieres this weekend on BBC WORLD News, the global news network available in the USA on-air, online and on radio.

A kind of "portrait of the artist as an old man," so to speak, the film focuses on Matisse's prolific time after his near-fatal illness and surgery when he invented this new kind of artistic "language" with the cut-outs.

In the film, the Tate Modern curator Nicholas Serota comments that he has wanted to do the show for 30 years and it is unlikely that an exhibit of the cut outs on this scale will ever be achieved again.

SPECTACULAR footage & visuals - including Matisse cutting & creating, the cut outs and other works, interviews with the artist?s former assistant, other artists and contemporaries, as well as scholars and historians.

FEATURING:
-- Alastair Sooke, host & presenter, "Henri Matisse - A Cut Above the Rest"
-- curator Nicholas Serota, director, Tate Modern
-- curator Nicholas Cullinan, curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art
-- Jacqueline Duheme, artist/illustrator and Matisse's assistant during innovative "Cut Outs" period (and the model for "Mary" in the Chapel of the Rosary)
-- Hilary Spurling, Matisse biographer
-- Francoise Gilot, artist, who recalls Matisse working loudly from bed with his fast-moving scissors

BBC WORLD NEWS - U.S. AIRDATES
The Culture Show: "Henri Matisse - A Cut Above the Rest"
Saturday, April 19 - 1:30 pm ET, 6:30 pm ET
Sunday, April 20 - 6:30 am ET
Friday, April 25 - 10:30 pm ET

Matisse was one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century who, even in his own lifetime, enjoyed a level of popularity envied by other artists. But in 1941, after a near-fatal operation for cancer, he decided to give up painting and sought a new way of drawing in colour. Scissors replaced a paintbrush and with the unique skill of a tailor he set about creating his now famous cut outs, that have yet to be rivalled for their originality and daring.

To coincide with a major Tate Modern exhibition in London this April, Alastair Sooke presents a moving and intimate portrait of Henri Matisse for BBC WORLD News. With contributions from the Tate?s Nicholas Serota, biographer Hilary Spurling and Jacqueline Duheme, who worked with Matisse in the late 1940?s at this critical turning point in his career.

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