Rhapsodic beauty has rarely been achieved with the kind of mastery found in the late cut-outs of Henri Matisse. That which the artist referred to as "the eternal conflict of drawing and color" was miraculously reconciled in the creations of this last, great phase of the artist's career.

At seventy-one, an age when most people feel they have completed their life's work, he was stricken by disease. Until his death in 1954, he lived in a permanent state of convalescence. Yet, a miracle of willpower, he forced into his last fourteen years a splendid succession of achievements .... During the years of his illness Matisse never revealed a morbid thought in his work. The more he suffered, the more he dared in his art.... Matisse, in his old age, worked with the vitality of youth and wisdom and knowledge of age. In his last works, in his papiers découpés, in his paintings, in his book illustrations, in his chapel at Vence, he risked more than ever before. This was the courage of an old man, a genius who knew that he would soon die and who had everything to gain in exploring the preoccupations of his whole life - color and line. (A. Liberman, op.cit., p. 45)

While making paper cutout maquettes in the early 1940s for his illustrated book Jazz, Matisse embarked on an exploration of the possibilities of cut paper, a technique which, in his hands, was fundamentally different both from Cubist papiers collés and from Surrealist collages. The enormous potential for this approach became immediately apparent to the artist, for it was neither drawing nor painting, but a combination of the two: "Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the color...I am drawing directly in color." (exh. cat., Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, op. cit., p. 413)

Unlike the Cubists who used scraps rescued from wastepaper baskets or the dadaists who cut up old mail-order catalogs, Matisse was not even satisfied with the best commercial colored papers: he had his own papers painted with gouaches of his own choosing and then proceeded with his scissors.... Once the colored paper was in hand, the scissors became the sole instrument used to define the shape of the individual image; but where the expert silhouette prided himself on cleverly concealing evidences of his technique, Matisse, with that modest respect for the medium which characterizes his generation, never tries to conceal the stroke of his scissors. (A.H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1966, p. 274)

[This approach] was a process with all the spontaneity of drawing. Indeed Matisse had found that "scissors can acquire more feeling for line than pencil or charcoal." Conceptually however, it was more like a sculptor releasing an imagined form from inside a block of marble or stone. Matisse may well have had this in mind when he said that "cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor." He may also have been thinking of the resistance of the heavy painted paper against his shears and the physicality of the medium as compared to painting. Although the cut-outs are in some respects among Matisse's most disembodied and ethereal works, they are also very tangible things. In their creation, Matisse brought something of the physical control of sculpture into the framework of his pictorial art. He cut into color much as if he were making a relief, and technically the cut-outs are in fact very shallow reliefs. The edges of the cut paper directly reveal the actions of his hand. In most of the cut-outs the paint covering the paper shows variations in density that stress their material nature. Matisse was clearly sensitive to the particularly physical nature of these works: while they were in progress he would leave them lightly pinned to the wall where they would tremble in the slightest breeze.

This pinning of images to the wall began the second of the two processes which produced the cut-outs: the decorative organization of the pre-formed signs. This was by far a longer and more deliberative process than the first one; it sometimes lasted several months and even from one year to the next for larger works. Matisse would change the position of the images, adding new ones, at times modifying existing ones, until the desired configuration was reached.

Matisse's "search for something unconfined by time and space" in the free world of memory matched and consolidated the calm and eternal mood of the subjects themselves. A harmony of drawing and color was essential to this endeavor, so that each image or view of nature was complete and self-contained exactly expressing that 'clear image of the whole' he felt to be so important. Color must not simply 'clothe' the form; it must constitute it. 'When I use paint I have a feeling of quantity -- a surface of color which is necessary to me and I modify the contour in order to determine my feeling clearly in a definitive way.' (J. Elderfield, op. cit., pp. 7-8, 21-22)

As early as 1950, Matisse was working almost exclusively on large paper cut-outs. His final large bronze was executed in 1950 and his last canvas in 1951. Poissons chinois was undertaken as a maquette for a stained-glass window for the Tériades' dining room in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. The image is composed through a series of dynamic repetitions. Set onto a rectangular grid of white paper, forms which suggest marine fauna and flowers cavort and play off of each other. At the top zone of the image three heraldic blue four-leafed flower shapes appear, a magenta "shadow" vibrating beneath each. Though similar, they are not identical, and their slight variations impart to them a vitality that is matched by their chromatic intensity. Below these flowers are three black crosses adumbrated with red and interspersed with small orange triangles and yellow rectangles. The alignment of the red and black crosses is such that the two on either side suggest lateral movement away from the center. The blue "clovers" appear a second time in the following zone, though the middle shape rises up significantly higher, thus adding a sense of vertical movement to the upper half of the image just as several elements in the lower half suggest downward movement. Just below the center of Poissons chinois is a white flower or coral form, tightly enframed in a black rectangle in which cavort a yellow botanical form and a downward-tending white shape which is virtually a pictograph for "fish." Matisse described this element as follows: "Here is a dugong -- an easily recognizable fish, it is in the Larousse -- and, above, a sea animal in the form of algae. Around are begonias..." (op. cit., exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1977, p. 71) These shapes are balanced by ten small orange begonia flowers, five on a side, with the lowest being the lightest in hue. A small red bow-shape at the bottom of the composition redirects the eye back upwards. Finally, the cut-out has its own internal frame: strips of rose, yellow, orange, and blue border the composition and extend the energies of the colors within its borders.

By combining animal and botanical forms with symbols such as the Xs across a fairly stable grid of rectilinear sheets, Matisse exploited seemingly chance encounters. A vivid sense of life and movement is presented through the dense, glowing masses of rich color, the intimations of wavering movement and its frankly decorative sensibility. While the very idea of beauty for its own sake has been an anathema to many artists of this century,

Matisse himself was not afraid to use the word "decorative" in talking about his work. He used it to explain that he was interpreting nature, not just copying it...and also to describe how he composed his pictures: composition is "the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings." This "decorative manner" meant an all-over distribution of expressive interest across the picture surface so that emotion -- Matisse's inter- pretive response to nature -- did not merely reside in the individual objects or figures within the picture but in the whole picture itself. "The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive," Matissse insisted, "everything has its share."

[Matisse's] frequent use of areas of repetitive patterning only emphasizes the freedom of symmetry of his compositional methods.... The taut resistant flatness that appeared at the end of Matisse's career needed to be marked out and separated as something pictorial more urgently than did the airy breathing surfaces of his earlier work. There the surface yielded to the eye letting it penetrate into the painting. The flatness stops the eye short. It can spread out almost without limit. Symmetry was one method of containing it. (J. Elderfield, op. cit., pp. 35-36).

It is an extraordinary experience to stand in front of one of these large cut-paper pictures. There is first of all, the sheer size of the imagery. In all but a few of his previous works Matisse had concentrated upon nuances of line and color; here he is concentrating upon physical scale...Matisse's shears cut into his imagination as well as into the paper. These enormous pictures are like enormous sighs of exhilaration as Matisse at last sighted the Promised Land: the complete simplification of painting. [For] in the cut papers Matisse finally realized the ideal of pure color that had been glimpsed by the Impressionists, analyzed by the Pointillists, fought for by the Fauves and exploited by the German Expressionists. Here was color on its own -- pure untrammeled, uncompromising -- commanding attention in itself and for itself.

Matisse had known about these alternatives to easel painting for years -- ever since he had prepared the mural for the Barnes Foundation. Now suddenly in his eighties, he realized that they could help him turn a handicap -- his physical condition -- into an advantage. Bedridden, cut off from the paints and brushes that had been mastered only after a life-time of work, he could have floundered in self-pity or settled for a hard- earned idleness. Instead he went on working as hard as ever and in the last five years of his life re-invented for himself a way of painting that younger artists all over the world were to adopt after his death. (J. Russell, The World of Matisse, New York, 1969, p. 170)


Matisse at work in his studio at the Hôtel Régina, Nice (Cimiez), circa 1950

In the Paris living room, circa 1951

Henri Matisse, circa 1951