Dr. Robert Schuler, Professor
153D Harvey Hall
715.232.1454
schulerr@uwstout.edu
Fax: 715.232.2093

"Matisse's Jazz and the Dance of Life"

 In 1941 the great painter Henri Matisse, recovering from traumatic surgery at the age of seventy-two, cultivated the art of the cut-out. By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career. Often confined to his wheelchair or a bed because of the surgery for duodenal cancer, two pulmonary embolisms, a prolapsed stomach, constrictions of the solar plexus, and the exhaustion caused by unrelenting insomnia, we can see him poised, in rapture, scissors ready for the inspiration to carve out color and shape together. The cut-out was not an abdication from painting and sculpting. It was a launching forward into a new plane of creativity and joy. Matisse said, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated" (Flam Retrospective 378). Moreover, continued experimentation with cut-outs offered Matisse innumberable opportunities to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: "You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird" (Cowart 233).

With his assistants, Matisse evolved a discipline:

A general system was then devised whereby his studio assistants brushed Linel gouaches on sheets of white paper.

The dried, colored papers, stockpiled as supplies, were available to Matisse at any given time. He often quite spontaneously cut out elements and placed them into compositions. As the play between consciously sought-for and the fortuitously-arrived at effects worked into their balances the projects moved toward completion. In the meantime many of them were posted about the studio walls (Cowart 14).

In the hand-written script that adorns Jazz, one of his cut-out masterpieces, Matisse speaks of the artist's need to be ever fresh:

A new painting should be a unique thing, a birth bringing a new face into the representation of the world through the human spirit. The artist should call for all of his energy, his sincerity, and the greatest possible modesty in order to push aside during his work the old cliches that come so readily to his hand and can suffocate the small flower which itself never turns out as one expected (Matisse xvi).

The Linel gouaches were employed because they "directly corresponded to commercial printers ink colors" (Cowart 17) and would reproduce perfectly. The cut-outs pulsate with energy. The bright, vibrant Linel colors, deep and Light Japanese Green, vert Emeraude (Imitation veridian), Deep Cadmium Yellow, Deep Cadmium Red, Deep Persian Red, Persian Violet, and Yellow Ochre (Cowart 274), keep leaping in front of our eyes.

Matisse seems to have executed the cut-outs with great joy. They allowed him to reach a goal:

The cut-out paper allows me to draw in color. It is a simplification. Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the color -- in which case one modified the other -- I am drawing directly in color, which will be the more measured as it will not be transposed. This simplification ensures an accuracy in the union of two means... It is not a starting point but a culmination (Cowart 17).

John Hallmark Neff sees the use of the cut-out as a logical step in Matisse's search for "the ultimate method":

each cut-out is a gesture, a continuous contour whose rightness depends on his ability to sustain the rhythm of his act, the flow of scissors through painted paper, a momentum which ensuredthe wholeness and integrity of each shape (Cowart 22).

Over the years I have developed some ideas, based on observations by Matisse, that have helped me to view and to meditate upon the cut-outs and the procedures which Matisse followed in making them. 1). The cut-out allowed Matisse to fashion shape and color at one and the same time. Matisse: "Thatís the reason I now work with cut-outs, in order to get a more powerful expression of pure color through the sharpness of the outline" (Flam Retrospective 383); 2). Colors directly affect the emotions. Matisse: "Thus simple colors can act upon the feelings with more force, the simpler they are. A blue for example, accompanied by the brilliance of its complementaries, acts upon the feelings like a sharp blow on a gong. The same with red and yellow; and the artist must be able to sound them when he needs to" (Flam On Art 196); 3). Colors must have strong relationships with one another; they must be positioned properly. Matisse: "It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony" (Flam On Art 216); 4). The cut-outs, especially the larger ones, posted on the walls of Matisse's studio, become a decorative, highly ornamental environment that was and is aesthetically and spiritually pleasing. We have countless photographs to prove that Matisse was his own interior decorator. He could improvise to his imagination's content by maneuvering the image/forms around their backgrounds, by placing cut-outs that were variations on a theme next to one another.Matisse: "There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them" (Flam On Art 174).

Jazz: the title was well chosen. In a letter to Brother Rayssiguier, Matisse crisply defined it: "the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience" (Schneider 666). Jazz, indeed, and almost all of the other cut-outs I have seen, abound with lively improvisation. Each cut-out shape is an exercise in fresh observation and execution. But both Jazz and musical jazz display the rehearsed discipline that lies behind successful improvisation. Whereas the jazz musician improvises within a composition by re-discovering, rehearing riffs and progressions he has hit upon while rehearsing, Matisse instructed his assistants to move the completed cut-out figures around the colored or white backgrounds, again and again, experimenting, improvising, until the final, most desirable arrangements were achieved.

The colors and the animated shapes disport themselves with undeniable liveliness. We cannot be sure of what Matisse means by "being at one with the audience" -- but I would like to venture a guess. For many years I have had copies of individual "scenes" from Jazz posted on the walls of my study and my desk. They always delight me, they always inspire me with the joy that is involved in pure making, and they have become an irreplaceable part of my physical and psychological environment. A tribute to my love of jazz and my love of Matisse's art.

Some riffs or solos or passages from Jazz trigger my imagination. Perhaps "The burial of Pierrot" is the comic burial of the old Matisse, Matisse before his illnesses. The border is not solid. It is composed primarily of tiny pink teardrops or raindrops, although a few black drops appear at the bottom. Just above them yellow raindrops or teardrops dive. The eye moves from image/shape/color to image/shape/color. Strange root-squiggle forms, quite stubby, arise. White, they are echoed by the white plume in the horse's headdress, the stockier, squarer legs of the horse, the blue ornament on the side of the carriage, the white and blue back of the carriage. The funereal carriage -- we must remember that it is a circus wagon -- is a fabulous mechanism; it is clopping along on wheels that are out of round into black space. At the top, wedged within a magnificent bright magenta rectangle, are images of the leaves of the Maritime Arrowhead (Cowart 109). This cut-out is a feast for the eyes.

I love "The Nightmare of the White Elephant." Pure colors and pure shapes. The movement. There are no borders. Perhaps the sinuous black shapes guide our eyes toward the suspended white image, borne by red bolts and slashes above a blue star. But the black shapes, squiggles and roots and knobbed branches, seem to be living creatures, almost arm in arm in a dance across space. Thus, my eyes travel right to left from black branch or root or cell, around space and stop at the red flares sailing past white, over the blue star, red, white, and blue emerging from a searing yellow background. No nightmares here. A delight of thÐÏࡱá

The many cut-outs titled "Lagoon" flourish with flower/amoeba forms. In "Lagoon I," Matisse has placed the positive of the magenta cut-out, the image carved out by the scissors, in relationship to the negative image, that which the scissors discarded, at least for the moment. Both kinds of lagoon shapes swell beyond the usual flower/amoeba form and become a long, sinuous swirl. One has a blackish bottom as if stationary, rooted, while the other floats freely in light blue space above a white, many-legged crawling form. A knobby-headed creature enters from the left. The right border is an orange shape that matches the bottom magenta shape, blockish on one side, possessing many waving tendrils on the other. A green squiggly, knobby form floats upward toward a white tendrilled figure cut out of black.

"Lagoon III" features forms that seem even more animalistic. Matisse has swollen, as it were, the forms so that the black one would seem to be a many-humped snail or snake, another a blue fish with a large maw, a blue antlered figure which is opposed to the bright red, caterpillar-like figure, and the last, a green trap of curled up claws.

For what seems to be the majority of his cut-outs, Matisse created and continually improvised upon a form I am going to name his "biota." Suggestive of animal or floral shapes, Matisse's biota are knobby, squiggly, several-lobed, many-footed or many-shooted. In Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-outs, they are referred to as "animal or undulating forms;" "alga;" "algae forms;" ìanimal and undulating forms;î "sea floor animals and plants;" "oceanic forms;" a "suspended dispersion of marine elements;" "plant forms;" "arabesques;" "leaf forms" and flowers. Matisse forged an amoeba-like form, a little cell that pushes, seeks, outwards in several directions. A germ that could shoot out to grow in whatever direction seemed most fruitful. It could bloom and climb like a stem or a flower; it could spread like a leaf. Matisse's shapes could be the fluttering wingtips of a hawk, exploring the wind. A hub of a fluid wheel moving outwards.

Pierre Schneider, in his monumental study Matisse, offers the idea that this form stems from the unconscious:

This protean form, which will be seen in the large gouaches to come, is all vigor, bringing to life all it touches. At once algae, hair, shell, coral, cloud, the human body, it demonstrates the kinship between the various kingdoms, the 'interpenetration of feeling.' It is, in a way, the symbol of the unconscious, that is, of the inner life (668).

"Fleurs de Neige" is one of the loveliest, one of the most fanciful cut-outs. Within squares of magenta, orange, and green, the sinuous forms condense, become wider, like snowflakes, fat snowflakes. The figure at the bottom right rises tall like a series of grouped stems. At top right the black form echoes the branching roots theme of some of the Jazz compositions. All of these figures grow, expand, search for space before your eyes. Some seem to have feet that can propel them out of the frame. Indeed, these portals of color are flowering with life. Yes, snow flowers in flakes, and brings blossoms to the places that it falls.

In "Les Velours" (Velvet) Matisse experiments once again with color arrangements. Not a single one of the twelve panels (or sheets to which the life-forms are glued) is white. Two are orange, two are blue, one is paler orange, one gray, one black, one mahogany. To say the least, the mixtures of color are unusual. White seahorses and horns and trees, knobby, squiggly, rooty shapes, float against the mahogany background. Red and yellow leaves, horny, leafy globules, drift downwards in blackness, a contrast apparently Chinese in inspiration. Light blue forms sprout out of light gray. Three black and blue skeleton-like tree forms spread across one dark orange panel; the other dark orange panel contains a smaller replica of the Lagoon form. In the middle large red roots, flanked by smaller blue trees, spread across the light orange soil. White lagoon figures are crammed into the blue panel. A light green panel is packed with six figures, four horned orange figures drifting downwards, two black ones arcing up. Edged with a black stripe, a green panel explodes with two white lagoons. The quadruple triptych ends with two yellow horned lagoons dancing out of blue.

Matisse improvises in "Les Velours" by contrasting colors with one another. White against a mahogany background. Red and yellow against black. Blue and black forms against gray; black branching against dark orange, light orange; white against green.

In "The Sheaf," leaf-forms, seed forms, radiate upwards and outwards, almost fill the white panel. Green, red, blue, orange, even black, often they seem to be hands exploring space. They have been launched into air. A fountain of colors, navy blue, dark green, blood red, orange, spouting out. Cowart suggests that Matisse has been inspired by Bergson's Evolution Creatrice: "For life is tendency, and the essence of the tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which the impetus is divided." (261). The multi-armed or footed or budding shapes flow -- or march -- outwards, across the background. These are not huddled stalks; energy -- "the impetus" -- is not bound. It has been released to penetrate into the surrounding space. Once again Matisse's central image is that of a budding life-force, a cell burgeoning outwards, an utterly dynamic form.

Matisse's "Sheaf" should be placed in the entryways of colleges and universities, art schools, courts, churches, places of public assembly. It is a paean to fertility, creativity, joy, joie de vivre.

One of the most famous cut-outs, "les betes de mer," contains, at the left bottom, the many-legged, three-humped monster "camel," a surging image of life questing horizontally through, nose sniffing into, a rose purple screen.

The sinuous forms that enter "Composition, Blue Background" suggest that there are no edges to the composition, that life-forms have clambered in, clasping, from the outside. One receives the strong impression that Matisse is trying to fill space in a dynamic and ornamental manner. When one looks at the wall of Matisse's study, covered with cut-outs, he gets the idea that space must be filled with   flourishes. In "Composition" two figures are variations on a snake shape. Four different versions of a leaf form sail down across the left half. A four-legged amoeba-like creature marches at botttom left. Surrounding a black flower, blossoming across blue.

I see Matisse, full of joy, applying ornamental designs to the space surrounding him. Some of his earlier canvases display a desire to seed space with ornamental images. I am thinking of "Interior with Eggplants;" "Checker Game and Piano Music;" and "Nude Standing at the Mantelpiece," to name a few. Certainly the Tree of Life window in the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary at Vence exhibits the desire to enhance and embellish space with ornamentation. Two large cut-outs, "The Parakeet and the Mermaid" and "Large Decoration with Masks" swarm with rich, colored images. I hear a mantra filling the air: Create/improvise; arrange/compose; delight, delight.

Perhaps "Mimosa" reigns as the most energetic and kinetic of the cut-outs. Yellow-tendrilled, snake-like, sinuous flower forms surge over gray-hooded black shoots. Other Matisse biota fill the bright and light orange and mahogany panels: several black stylized idol forms and huge blue amoeba forms that seem to establish a triad; black long-legged spider forms. The colors are vivid, surging, a bit ominous.

The sinuous yellow dancing shape surrounds, perhaps rises out of, the gray-hooded black figures and dominates the center of the composition. It flowers outwards, and perhaps, as in the "Bataille des Fleurs" of Nice, conquers all of the other flower forms and receives the approval of the totemic black forms placed above and below on the left and in the middle on the right. Just below the totemic figures three black butterflies sail out of similar blue rooted or celled forms. A black spider drops from the right top corner. A long, dangling multi-branched black shape, a root system, stretches out below the mimosa. These images fill the orange squares, three-quarters of the composition, and the mahogany square at the bottom left. Matisse's biota surge forth, almost completely filling, with vibrant colors, brief space.

In the cut-outs Matisse improvised, with gusto, a lovely, forceful, and ornamental new art form. In a conversation with Brother Raysigguier, Matisse observed, "The primary quality of a work of art must be its decorativeness" (Schneider 704). Above all, this innovative, improvisatory art became a series of environments that nourished the mind and the soul. Environments that inspire while filling the immediate space with beauty and delight, and joie de vivre.

Works Cited

Cowart, Jack, et al. Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-outs. St. Louis and Detroit: The St. Louis Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1977.

Flam, Jack D., ed. Matisse: A Retrospective. New York: Beaux Arts, 1988.

Flam, Jack D., ed. Matisse on Art . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Matisse, Henri. Jazz. New York, Braziller, 1984.

Schneider, Pierre. Matisse. New York, Rizzoli, 1984.

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