Composition (Harmonie tahitienne)

Illness and repeated surgery in 1941, which made Matisse develop a new technical language that could be employed from his chair or his bed, did not interrupt Matisse's work as a painter. "The paper cut-out", Matisse explained in 1951, "allows me to draw in colour. It is for me a matter of simplification instead of drawing the contour and filling in the colour - one modifying the other - I draw directly into the colour, which is all the more controlled in that it is not transposed. This simplification guarantees a precision in the reunion of the two means which brings them together as one." (quoted in N. Watkins, Matisse, Oxford 1984, p. 206). Towards the end of his life, in ill health and unable to work at an easel, he worked intensely in this method: cut and pasted gouache compositions, a technique he first employed in 1933 to prepare the celebrated Dance for the Barnes Collection. He continued working in this medium and varied and developed it on an increasingly larger scale, until his death in 1954. The cut-outs were made from heavy drawing paper, which Matisse's assistants covered in gouache and coloured to his exact requirements. "Even the streaks of gouache were like the grain of a natural material. It was the basic material of painting, the flat radiance of colour itself, which fascinated him. Matisse set about with his scissors... with a decisiveness that developed into an unparallelled virtouosity with new instruments. When he began working with cut out paper he wrote of 'drawing with scissors'... In the text he provided in 1947 for Jazz he wrote: "cutting into living colour reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving". The association was significant: he was cutting into a primal substance, the basic chromatic substance that he had extracted from Impressionism... With each stroke the cutting revealed the character both of the material, the pristine substance, and also of an image...Often the theme was more mobile and flowing than anything he had painted for years; the movement was like a dance" (L. Gowing, Matisse, London, 1979, p. 185).
Dating from 1947 Harmonie tahitienne, is in fact one of the first paper cut-outs Matisse produced and started in John Elderfield's words "the journey to an ideal land, a land that mirrors the temperament of the traveller...The cut-outs with their pastoral subjects and their distilled signs filtered to the essentials, fixed in a non-material, mental space were final acts of idealization and realization at one and the same time. 'It was always', he said, 'in view of a complete possession of my mind - a sort of hierarchy of my sensation - that I kept working, in the hope of finding an ultimate method'. The ultimate method was that of the cut-outs - but only because it was the last. It was the kind of journey that could have gone on forever. (J.Elderfield, The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse, New York 1978, p.39).
As the last act in Matisse's oeuvre, the paper cut-outs not only recapitulate the opening theme of the painter who now is universally regarded as one of the greatest colourist of the century, but moreover culminate in achieving the very "essence of painting", as it has been described (as quoted in J. Guichard-Meili, Matisse Paper Cutouts, London 1984, p. 9).