Henri Matisse

Jean Matisse, France
Gérard Matisse, France (by descent from the above)
Private Collection, USA
Guggenheim Asher Associates, New York (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in May 1998

Henri Matisse: Les Grandes Gouaches Découpées (exhibition catalogue), Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1961, illustrated p. 45
Georges Duthuit, “Matisse’s Illuminations,” Portfolio & Art News Annual, 1962, illustrated p. 99
John Jacobus, Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, illustrated p. 51
Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade and John Hallmark Neff, Henri Matisse, Paper Cut-Outs, New York, 1977, no. 82, illustrated p. 146

Although Matisse had experimented with the use of cut paper as a compositional tool in the 1920s and 30s, most significantly during the development of his designs for the Barnes Mural in 1931, it was during the 1940s that Matisse began to explore cut paper as an independent medium.  The cut-outs often appear to be a radical break from his career as a painter and sculptor, but Matisse himself described the making of paper cut-outs as a natural progression of his work, "The cut-out paper allows me to draw in color: It is a simplification.  Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the color - in which case one modified the other - I am drawing directly in color .... It is not a starting point but a culmination." (cited in Cowart, Flam et al., op. cit., p. 17)  Matisse's unequaled sense of line thus found a new mode of expression, in the curving path of scissors through brightly colored sheets of paper, linking what for Matisse had been two separate modes of expression:  his black and white drawings and his color paintings.  While the cut-out method is thus related to his earlier work, it also had its own rules, its own methods of composition.  In working with flat sheets of paper, Matisse almost never used the cut-paper designs to describe three-dimensional space.  The cut-outs use imagery only of flat surfaces:  leaves, shadows, flattened figures, and the space that exists is the flat space of the paper backgrounds. 

The present work is a beautiful example of how Matisse developed a language of forms that was specific to the new process of cut paper.  The two vertical shapes, for instance, reflect the vertical sheet of paper used as the background, with the top and right edges of the black shape matching the edges of the orange sheet.  The purple and black shapes also suggest the process of cutting in which two different shapes are produced, on either side of the cut.  While the two shapes don't click like puzzle pieces, they hint at a match between the pointy shapes of the purple form and the absent spaces of the black form.  The language of the cut-outs is so self-contained--layers of paper that illustrate the process of their creation--that it is almost as if we are witnessing a new organic form.  As E. Tériade wrote of the cut-outs in 1953,  "The marvelous judgement of Matisse, consists of making all of the effort of making his work disappear, of obscuring the tracks of his achievement, of effacing every trace of his wish to succeed, for the conclusion remains only in the field of the work itself, a bright flower and a crystal of spring water. . .  The work of affixing begins, of color to color, without foreign intervention, the dialogue establishes itself, the composition forms itself." (E. Tériade, Henri Matisse, Papiers découpés, Paris, 1953)

As Tériade's description suggests, Matisse's use of imagery derived from leaves, seaweed and other organic material, gives the final works a powerful sense of life, as the cut-outs appear to create themselves.  It is as if the process of creation for Matisse has become one of tending a garden.  A photograph of Matisse's studio in Vence, circa 1947, shows the present work (at upper right) embedded in just such a garden (fig. 1).  In an interview in 1952, Matisse gave a wonderfully poetic response that describes the transformative power of the cut-outs,  "You see that since I have to spend so much time in bed because of my health, I have made myself a little garden all around me, where I can take a walk . . . . There are leaves, fruits, a bird. Moderate movement, calming. . . . It’s in entering the object that one enters one’s own skin. I was making this parakeet with colored paper. And so! I had become the parakeet. And I had rediscovered myself in the work. The Chinese say that one must elevate oneself with the tree. I know of nothing more true." (as cited in Cowart, Flam et al., op. cit., p. 282)