Artwork Information

Henri Matisse almost exclusively made paper cut-outs in the late 1940s. Using scissors to cut painted pieces of paper into shapes of varying sizes and colours, he would arrange the resulting forms into vibrant, decorative compositions. Initially a design for a book, this work contains four rosettes that float on a vibrant ground of cadmium yellow. Although the three pieces of blue paper on the central vertical axis evoke a human figure, their eccentric outlines make them visually ambiguous and somewhat indecipherable. Through the radical process of using scissors to ‘draw directly in colour’, Matisse in his cut-outs achieved what he termed a ‘distillation of form’, transforming objects into ‘signs’ that only obliquely resemble the things they reference. To make his cut-outs even more visually dynamic, Matisse would exploit the contrasts created by complementary colour, juxtaposing yellows with purples, oranges with blues, and blacks with luminous whites.

− 2024