with one of his assistants to a favorite pool

in the south of France to see divers

and it was so hot, and so sunny he said

"I'm gonna die of the heat, let's go home.

"I'll make my own swimming pool myself."

He asked his assistant to install a white paper frieze

at a height of about five and a half feet

and he cut blue painted paper into forms

of swimmers, divers, sea creatures

and the forms were pinned by his assistants

on to the burlap wall one by one.

The work stayed that way until his death in 1954.

After his death the work was traced,

it was sent to Paris in pieces, and glued onto

new burlap despite the known acidity of burlap

and its propensity to change color over time.

The white paper frieze was also new.

- The Museum of Modern Art acquired

the "Swimming Pool" in 1975.

It's arguably one of Matisse's

most important cut-outs and certainly

one of the most popular works of art in our collection.

People loved looking at it because

it's so lively and animated and gave you

a real sense of the way in which

Matisse worked with cut paper.

Unfortunately, by 1993 it had become discolored.

The burlap background had started to change color

and it had affected the paper itself

and so we decided it was no longer capable

of being displayed to the public.

About five years ago we started an

intense research project to figure out how

to make it viewable again, what we could do to

restore it, and conserve it, and bring it back to life.

This meant working with conservation scientists,

with art historians, with conservators,

to try and figure out a way in which

to return it to display.

In doing that, the cut-outs, which we

thought we understood, became alive again

as we realized that he had worked

in a very different way than we had thought.

- From the very beginning I had three goals.

The first was to return the color balance to the work.

That is tan burlap, white paper and blue cut-outs.

The second goal was to install

the work at its proper height.

Because of MoMA's ceiling heights

this had never been feasible.

Third goal was to mimic, as best as possible,

the architecture of the original room

to allow the viewer to really feel surrounded

by the cut-out and immersed in the "Swimming Pool".

A central part of the research was

to explore the way the cut-outs looked

when Matisse lived with them in his studios.

Claude Duthuit, the grandson of Matisse,

gave me a piece of the original burlap

from Matisse's dining room so I was able

to see the original color and the weave

that would have been my goal.

And I was very happy to find in the conservation archive

this small sample of the fabric used in 1955.

Never seen the light of day, not aged, not discolored.

You can see that over time this burlap changed

because of light exposure, because of atmospheric pollution,

and that's why I was so concerned

to replace this and get back to this.

The most time consuming part of the whole process

was the removal of the burlap from the cut forms.

I used a rotary tool, and then took a scalpel

and scraped off the remaining fibers.

When I felt that this was hurting the paper too much

I just took a fiber and i pulled it one by one

which took approximately 2000 hours.

My research led me to replace it with this new burlap

which the work will be mounted onto.

- The nature of burlap is that it's sort of an

imperfect industrial material, it's not

produced to be used on fine art.

It has a lot of imperfections.

There were a lot of clumps of dark fibers

and we found ourselves combing through

and picking out impurities.

- There was an idea, that because the way paper

has discolored over time, perhaps it

would have been possible to replace the

white paper with a new, whiter paper.

I made the decision not to do that

because the white paper has aged

the same amount of time as the blue

and if a new white paper had been inserted

it would have seemed jarringly white

as compared to the blue.

- So surface cleaning was performed on the

white paper using a vinyl eraser.

That couldn't be done on the painted blue pieces

due to the sensitivity of the gouache

and that meant going in with a very sharp colored pencil

and just touching out those little

scratches and dings that have happened over the years

so that the viewer only sees the

beauty of the blue cut paper.

- One of the controversial aspects of this

conservation process has been that instead

of mounting the white frieze and blue forms

with a new adhesive, the forms will be

pinned to new burlap panels.

This has never really been done before

on a Matisse conservation project.

This process has two goals.

One is to return to the work a little bit

of the three-dimensional liveliness

that the works would have had

in the studio when he lived with them.

And secondly, the white and blue will be

against the burlap only for the months

that they are on view.

Once the exhibition is over the works are unpinned

and they will no longer be in contact with the burlap,

which even though it is new, is still acidic.

- This is really important for future display

and for the future stability of this piece.

- The research that we did on the "Swimming Pool"

informed how we thought about all of Matisse's cut-outs,

and that's what makes this exhibition different

than any other exhibition about Matisse's work before

because this exhibition looks at the way in which Matisse

lived with these works of art, how he animated his life

by manipulating the paper forms that he cut out,

how he understood these works as organic

and I think that really comes through

in the way in which we've created displays here

that allow people to get a sense of what it

must have been like for Matisse to be surrounded

by this world he created for himself.

- This will offer both to the public

and to the conservation field an incredibly important way

of thinking about how the cut-out should be seen

and also how they should be conserved.