Fair-weather National Gallery of Art visitors who climb the spiral staircase to the East Building’s Tower Gallery expecting to revisit the Henri Matisse cutouts that resided there for years are in for a shock. But it’s not an unpleasant one.

The cutouts — assemblages of hand-cut colored paper made in the final 15 years of the French painter’s long career — have been relocated to the East Building’s concourse level to make way for a series of exhibitions focusing on works made after 1970.