Matisse's Jazz: Rhythms in Color

In the early 1940s, decades into his artistic career, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) turned his focus to a new medium: cut paper. He had become bedridden and unable to paint following an excruciating abdominal surgery, and cut paper allowed him to continue to create in his relatively sedentary state. Encouraged by his friend, the book publisher Tériade (the pseudonym of Stratis Eleftheriades), Matisse furthered his exploration of this new technique. He mined his memories of Parisian music halls, the circus, trips to Tahiti, folktales, and mythology, and produced a series of 20 cut-paper maquettes. These vibrant original compositions were then faithfully reproduced using pochoir (stencil) and combined with an original text written by Matisse to form an unbound book, Jazz, that was published in 1947—when Matisse was 77 years old. Jazz caused an immediate international sensation and reinvigorated the aging artist, setting him on a new course of artistic discovery. Matisse's extraordinary images of Jazz are not only captivating and provocative in their own right but also reflect a practice devoted to the exploration of color and line. Throughout the artist's decades-long career, he pushed color from the purely visual to the nearly transcendental and progressively simplified his line to the most elemental. But until his cut-outs, his color and line existed separately, one modifying the other but never fully unified—at least not to Matisse's own satisfaction. This exhibition marks the first time Matisse's Jazz will be shown in its entirety at the Art Institute; the museum acquired it in 1948. One of the most important livres d'artiste (artist books) of the 20th century, Jazz joins over 50 works from the museum's renowned collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, illustrated books, and textiles to showcase the famed artist's commitment across his 50-year career to continual innovation and the expressive power of color and line.