12 Days

For each of the 12 days of Christmas we have asked Apollo staff and contributors to select the artistic highlights that they are most eagerly anticipating in 2014. The Muse Room will return with its regular daily blogs on 7 January 2014. From all of us at Apollo, happy new year!

London is an incredibly international cultural hub. There are so many events to look forward to in 2014, from ‘The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier’ at the Barbican (9 April–17 August 2014), to the unveiling of beautifully restored galleries at the V&A. But the exhibition I am most looking forward to is ‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’, opening at Tate Modern on 17 April (until 7 September 2014).

Blue Nude (I) (1952), Henri Matisse © Succession Henri Matisse/DACS 2013. Photo: Robert Bayer, Basel

Matisse is one of my most loved artists, a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor, and his cut-outs are amongst my favourite works of the 20th century. They are extraordinary bursts of expression, and represent a radiance and renewal of creative energy that is particularly poignant as he began them in the last 14 years of his life, and after he had been diagnosed with cancer. He called the technique ‘painting with scissors’ and said ‘Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.’ Tate Modern’s major exhibition will bring together around 120 works and the largest number of ‘blue nudes’ ever exhibited together.

‘The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier’ is at the Barbican from 9 April–17 August 2014.

‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’ is at Tate Modern from 17 April–7 September 2014.