Member Lecture: Matisse’s Jazz—Rhythms in Color

Why It Matters

The exhibition shows how Matisse turned wartime hardship into a revolutionary artistic language, reshaping modern printmaking and influencing contemporary limited‑edition art practices.

Key Takeaways

• Matisse's 'Jazz' marks the breakthrough of cut‑paper as standalone art.
• Health crisis forced Matisse to abandon easel painting, invent new technique.
• Collaboration with publisher Teriade and pochoir printing ensured color fidelity.
• The book blends circus motifs, mythology, and wartime nostalgia.
• Exhibition contextualizes 'Jazz' within WWII and Matisse’s late creative surge.

Summary

The Art Institute of Chicago’s new exhibition “Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color” revisits Henri Matisse’s 1947 artist book “Jazz,” a pivotal work created during the final decade of his life. Curator Emily Ziemba frames the book as both a personal artistic breakthrough and a cultural artifact born amid World War II.

Ziemba explains that a 1941 surgery left Matisse unable to paint on an easel, prompting him to develop the cut‑paper method—painting sheets of gouache‑tinted paper, cutting shapes with giant shears, and assembling them into compositions. This process turned color and line into a single, self‑contained language, and the resulting maquettes became the basis for “Jazz.”

Matisse’s collaborator, publisher Teriade, recognized the novelty, insisting on pochoir (stencil) printing to preserve the exact hues of the originals. As Matisse put it, “I draw with color… it is a completion.” The book’s imagery—circus performers, mythic figures, and memories of Nice—reflects both his lifelong fascination with spectacle and the wartime yearning for joy.

By situating “Jazz” within its personal, technical, and historical contexts, the exhibition illuminates how adversity can spark innovation and how the work’s handcrafted production prefigures today’s limited‑edition art books. For scholars, collectors, and the public, the show offers a rare glimpse into the final, most experimental chapter of a 20th‑century master.

Original Description

On the surface, Henri Matisse’s artist book "Jazz" is a captivating experiment with color and line, in which the artist depicted his memories of Parisian music halls, the circus, trips to Tahiti, folktales, and mythology. But the book's almost whimsical abstracted forms mask the harsh circumstances of its creation in early 1940s France: Matisse’s painful recovery from abdominal surgery, the country's Nazi occupation, and the unprecedented violence of World War II.

Curator Emily Ziemba shares a closer look at the darker undercurrents of this vibrant artist’s book—one of the most important of the 20th century.