Collection: Matisse Henri

Henri Matisse: the painter of joie de vivre

From his earliest works, Henri Matisse pushed the 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 constant characteristic of all his production. His journey was a long process of simplification: of forms, of line, of color, until reducing everything to its purest essence. In 1947 he created the famous series Jazz, which he defined as “rhythmic improvisation,” the first great example of how cutouts could become an autonomous language. From 1950 to 1951, he produced the sketches for the Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence, which he called the masterpiece of his existence: unlike his early works where color was shouted and provocative, here the colors were sung, harmonious, pure.

When Matisse danced with scissors: the Blue Nudes

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