This month’s Shop Talk column was all about abstract art, so for this month’s Recommending Reading, we’re looking to a classic book in the same genre: Henri Matisse’s Jazz.
Matisse was a legendary artist who lived and worked in the first half of the twentieth century. According to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “His breakthrough as an artist came during the summers of 1904 and 1905, when the bright sunlight of the South of France inspired him—along with artists like André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck—to create optically dynamic works of bright, clashing colors that led to these artists being derided with the epithet fauves (wild beasts). Known as Fauvism, the work from this period set him on a career-long path that he described as ‘construction by colored surfaces.'”
Matisse used that approach to paint all kinds of things—abstract and not. But late in his life, he was bed-ridden and no longer able to paint. Undeterred, he turned to cut-outs. As Holland Cotter explained in the New York Times, “He picked up more manageable materials and tools: sheets of paper paint-washed by assistants, sturdy scissors, and plain tailor pins. What he made from them was a hybrid of chromatic brilliance and dimensional complexity, work that was not quite painting, not quite sculpture and—this was the really radical part—not necessarily permanent.”
He included twenty of those works in Jazz, released in 1947. Unfortunately, though, Matisse hated the book. “All the irregularities of texture, the paper-on-paper depths, what Matisse referred to as the “sensitivity” of the designs, were missing,” Cotter writes. He continued experimenting with the cut-outs, eventually creating a number of works now displayed at MoMA.
Only 250 copies of Jazz were printed, so good luck getting a hand on one! But don’t worry: you can see the art works at the Art Gallery of NSW website.
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