.Matisse - Jazz

“Cut-out paper allows me to draw in color. For me this is a simplification. Instead of drawing the outline and installing the color – one modifying the other – I draw directly in the color, which is all the more measured because it is not composed. This simplification guarantees precision in the union of the two means, which become one. " Henri Matisse

Published in September 1947, but developed in 1943, Jazz (models and book) is a key moment in the evolution of Matisse, it is the experimental space, the laboratory which allows him to move from painting to the practice of cut paper that he developed during the last decade of his life.

The publisher Tériade had suggested to Matisse in the summer of 1941 the publication of a color book and even that of a “modern painting manuscript”. From this time he was thinking about the use of flat areas colored with gouache that Matisse had begun to develop, until then only for one-off projects, covers for Cahiers d'Art and for Verve in particular. Matisse only began to actually work on the models at the beginning of 1943. The first ones created were The Clown and The Toboggan (which would become the first and last pages of the book respectively) on the theme of the Circus which was the original title chosen by Matisse before he does not retain the word Jazz , better suited to the lively and syncopated character of the colorful cutouts. The creation of the boards continued during 1943, and the beginning of 1944 while he was based in Vence in the town of Le Rêve.

On August 5, 19443, Matisse listed eighteen models at Tériade, the boards were therefore almost completed (with the exception of two Lagoons).

In 1946, Matisse completed the model for his “flower book”, Jazz – composed of twenty color plates, executed in gouaches cut between the end of June 1943 and 1944, and writing pages –, which would be published by Tériade in 1947 This first set using systematically and only the technique of gouache cut “live” in color will constitute the matrix of his subsequent work, until his death in 1954.