Lecture: Matisse’s Cut-Outs—The Development of a New Medium

Why It Matters

The story reveals how Matisse’s cut‑outs were a deliberate, collaborative breakthrough, informing contemporary curatorial narratives and reinforcing the medium’s pivotal role in 20th‑century art.

Key Takeaways

• Matisse’s cut‑outs evolved from practical design tools to a distinct medium.
• ‘Jazz’ and ‘Oceania’ served as pivotal experiments before full cut‑out mastery.
• Collaboration with assistants and publishers ensured color fidelity from paper to pochoir.
• Barnes mural and ‘Verve’ covers seeded later cut‑out aesthetics.
• Matisse treated positive and negative paper shapes as equally compositional elements.

Summary

The lecture, delivered by MoMA curator Samantha Friedman at the Art Institute’s “Matisse’s ‘Jazz’: Rhythms in Color” exhibition, traced the evolution of Henri Matisse’s late‑career cut‑out technique.

Friedman explained that the cut‑out began as a pragmatic solution—painting sheets of paper with gouache and cutting them for the Barnes mural, Verve magazine covers, and the ballet ‘Rouge et Noir.’ The publisher Teriade’s demand for color‑faithful pochoir reproductions of these maquettes pushed Matisse toward a self‑contained medium, culminating in the large‑scale works ‘Jazz’ (1943‑47) and ‘Oceania – The Sea’ (1946‑48).

She highlighted specific visual links: the tumbling figure from a 1937 Verve cover reappears in ‘The Clown’ plate of Jazz; the negative‑positive interplay in the ‘Lagoon’ series reflects Matisse’s fascination with both sides of a cut shape. A vivid anecdote recounted Matisse covering a wall with spontaneous paper cuts in 1946, a moment captured by Brassaï and later formalized into wall‑hung panels.

Understanding this incremental, collaborative process reshapes how curators present the cut‑outs—as the final, autonomous invention rather than a mere illustration tool—offering audiences insight into modernist experimentation with materiality, color, and compositional logic.

Original Description

The exhibition "Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color" culminates chronologically with two works from the late 1940s: the illustrated book "Jazz" and the mural-like screen print "Océanie - La Mer (Oceania - The Sea)." Yet these works also signal the beginning of a radical new medium that reinvigorated Matisse's late career.

Hear from Samantha Friedman, curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as she traces how Matisse’s cut-paper method went from being a design expedient to an independent practice, from a means to a resplendent end.

Support for this program was provided by the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.