Collection: Matisse Henri

Joie de vivre in Matisse’s prints

From his earliest works, Henri Matisse pushed color tones to extremes: he wanted to paint with “the bluest blue and the reddest red possible” in order to express that indestructible joie de vivre, a constant feature of his entire body of work. His artistic journey was a long process of simplification: of form, line, and color, until everything was reduced to its purest essence. In 1947, he created the famous series Jazz, which he described as “rhythmic improvisation,” the first major example of how paper cutouts could become an autonomous language. From 1950 to 1951, he produced the designs for the Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence, which he called the masterpiece of his life: unlike his early works, in which color was loud and provocative, here the hues were lyrical, harmonious, and pure.

When Matisse danced with scissors: the Blue Nudes

In the final years of his life, Matisse could no longer stand at his easel, his illness having confined him to a wheelchair, but his desire to create had not left him. On the contrary, it had perhaps become even more urgent. He began painting sheets of paper in vivid colors, then cutting them out with scissors and assembling them, “drawing in color”—as he liked to say—and thus freeing himself from the constraints of traditional painting to create essential, liberated forms. The papiers gouachés-découpés are unique works, born from his hands and scissors; the color lithographs of the Blue Nudes convey all their power: unforgettable cobalt blue fills the female silhouettes in their essential form (both pure and sensual) and traces the movement of the bodies themselves and their vitality. They express that joie de vivre that fills the white space, a lightness that seems to defy the weight of the years and fatigue. They communicate a rare energy—the energy of an artist who continued to reinvent himself until his very last cutout.