STUTTGART.- Staatsgalerie Sttutgart presents today the first world exhibition dedicated to portraits by Henri Matisse, with a total of 110 works of art. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and drawings that will allow us to understand how he created the human face from a personal aspect and know his works from unexpected angles, according to museum director Sean Rainbird.

The exhibition is titled "People, Masks, Models," and will be on view through January 11, 2009. It includes al the productive periods and includes personal works including self-portraits, as well as portraits of his daughter Marguerite and other relatives and friends.

The exhibition was created from works loaned by museums in France, Greece, Great Britain, United States and Germany and tries to show how one of the most important artists of the 20th century wavered between individuality and anonymity in his representations of people.

According to the museum, Matisse established a deep relationship with his models and his works did not always correspond with the external aspect of the occasional mannequin.

According to Rainbird, “At the end, his link to this person could reach a climax in the form of super individuality where the facial features of the subject become a mask.”

The exhibition includes his first works from around 1900 up to his last mask reproductions. It also includes some of Matisse’s explorations with Cubism, with a group of portraits from 1914, among them one of "Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg" from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The exhibition was curated by Ina Conzen, who stated that before Matisse died, he wrote about his own portraits and described painting people as “one of the most relevant arts".