Collection: Henri Matisse

The 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” to express that indestructible joie de vivre, a defining feature of all his 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 Jazz series, which he called “rhythmic improvisation,” the first major example of how cut-outs 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, where color was loud and provocative, here the colors sang, 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, as illness had confined him to a wheelchair, but his desire to create had not left him. If anything, it may have become even more urgent. He began painting sheets of paper in vivid colors, then cutting them out with scissors and assembling them, “drawing with color” – as he liked to say – and thus freeing himself from the constraints of traditional painting to create essential, free-flowing forms. The papiers gouachés-découpés are unique works, born of his hands and scissors; the color lithographs of the Blue Nudes capture 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 the joie de vivre that fills the white space, and a lightness that seems to defy the weight of the years and the strain of exertion. They convey a rare energy, that of an artist who continued to reinvent himself until his very last cut-out.