Museo Carmen Thyssen

Exhibition sponsored by:

In the 1940s Henri Matisse’s failing health and difficulty painting led him to embark on a new stage of creative exploration in which collage using papiers découpés (paper cut-outs) became his chief means of expression. One of the products of this brilliant final stage of his career is Jazz, an innovative and experimental book which Tériade, the publisher, described as ‘a manuscript with modern paintings, the most beautiful book ever made on colour’.  

The idea for the book, which came out in 1947, arose in 1942 when Matisse produced his first collages for the magazine Verve, which was published by Tériade. A masterpiece of its kind, Jazz features twenty illustrations. To print them from the original collages Matisse composed from shapes cut out of paper painted in gouache, a stencil technique was used with templates for reproducing the various shapes and the effect of overlapping, and employing the same pigments. This painstaking manual procedure resulted in very attractive, carefully crafted books produced one at a time, so that each copy is unique. Two editions were printed in 1947: one of 100 copies without text, like the one on display here, which has been lent by the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (France); and another of 250 copies with accompanying manuscript notes written by the artist with a brush.

Despite the novelty of the medium, Jazz is a continuation of Matisse’s painting in the use of colour as an expressive and compositional element and in his taste for decoration. The new technique gives rise to compositions of flat, pure and vibrant colours from which the artist extracts essential, flexible, dynamic and light silhouettes with his scissors, grouping them into ‘chromatic and rhythmic improvisations’ that visually evoke the sounds of jazz music. The figures, plant elements, arabesques and abstract silhouettes, inspired by the circus, folktales or recollections of the artist’s travels, form a melody of colours. Dispensing with lines and brushes and drawing with a pair of scissors, Matisse reinvents himself as a painter and achieves very striking visual effects.