Top Paintings, Drawings, and Cut-Outs From Henri Matisse – The Colour of Ideas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Seated Pink Nude, 1935-36

In 1930, Matisse traveled to Tahiti and the United States. These travels brought about a new shift in his paintings. The nudes he painted in this period were monumental and reduced to almost geometric forms. He was focused on reinterpreting the relationship between the figure and the background plane. In this period, he also photographed the different stages in his works, and then kept reworking the paintings and simplifying them, often by wiping or scraping off paint. It is with this approach that Matisse worked on Seated Pink Nude, a painting of his favorite model Lydia Delectorskaya. The painting had 13 different stages, and the canvas shows the traces of Matisse’s reworking and simplification. The final result is a powerful and mysterious figure with no face, just a ghostly blurring and a mirage of the different poses that she had taken in the previous stages. The separate phases of the process have become part of the final painting. 

Face of a Woman (Starry Veil), L5, 1942

During World War II, in 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. Following a successful surgery, he found himself bedridden for nearly three months. During this time, he made a large number of drawings and illustrations, and developed a totally new art form since the productions of paintings and sculptures had become physically taxing for him – his cut-out paper collages or découpages. 

In 1943, he published an album called Drawings. Themes and Variations, in which he laid bare his creative method: he would observe his motif and create a series of variations on it, with only slight differences, to get to the core of it and present it in the most concentrated form. The most often recurring motifs were female nudes and still lifes, and Face of a Woman (Starry Veil) is among one of his drawing series. His drawings also served as preparations for his paintings.

Pale Blue Windows (for the Chapel of the Rosary, Vence), 1948-51

Matisse moved from Nice to the small town of Vence in 1943, when Nice came under threat from bombardment during WWII. In Vence, he made his final series of paintings and more advanced expression of colors, known as the “Vence interiors”. The series is a summary of Matisse’s painting oeuvre. After that, he almost exclusively continued creating his cut-outs, or découpages, using paper and gouache – a method he had started working with after his surgery and weakening health. In this new context, Matisse continued to explore the harmony between color and line. 

From 1948, the artist dedicated himself to the decoration of Vence’s Dominican Chapel of the Rosary. He worked with large cut-outs to create the patterned designs for the stained glass windows on the chapel’s southern wall. The second version of the designs Matisse made for the chapel is one of the centerpieces of the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, titled Pale Blue Windows. The brightly colored motifs are memories of Matisse’s trips to Tahiti and Polynesia in 1930. Matisse did not only create the stained glass windows for the chapel but also painted designs of figures (saints and Mary holding the baby Jesus) on white tiles on the walls of the chapel, creating a fully immersive art piece in the chapel. The project was concluded in 1952, a couple of years before Matisse’s death.

Designs for Verve, 1937-1949

In his cut-out work, Matisse first painted sheets of paper with gouache, and then cut out various shapes and arranged them into new compositions. Through this approach, he finally felt he managed to harmonize line and color, something he had been trying to achieve throughout his entire career. 

In 1937, Matisse produced his first cover design for the art and literary magazine Verve, a publication by Tériade. He would continue to design covers for five other issues. Verve printed reproductions of works by artists including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Chagall. For the covers, Matisse worked solely with his paper cut-outs. In order to ensure that the colors were as accurate as possible, he designed the covers in the Tériade office, using color samples of the ink pigments for his cut-outs. The result is a beautiful collection of cover designs that create a visual harmony between text, image, color, and line. 

Jazz, 1947

In 1943, Matisse was commissioned by Tériade to create a series of stencils in gouache for a “book on color”, inspired by the work he had done for the Verve publications. The idea was to try out a technique that would enable the works to be easily reproduced. Matisse found a parallel in jazz music, saying: “Each red remains red, each blue remains blue – like jazz, in which each performer playing as a soloist increases his part of his fantasy, of his sensitivity.”

The technique of making color cut-outs subsequently became a practice in its own right – it was revealed to the public with the publication of the aptly named album Jazz. In the 1947 edition, Matisse chose to alternate color plates and manuscript pages with text written in his own handwriting, like a modern version of a medieval illuminated manuscript. Alongside his most famous paintings, Jazz is without a doubt one of the peaks of Matisse’s oeuvre, in which he found the perfect harmony between the lightness of his vibrant colors, the directness of his cut-out figures and motifs, and the simplicity of pared-down forms. 

Relevant sources to learn more

Keep reading on Artland Magazine
Trace Matisse’s artistic development in our article about his art, life and legacy
Read our article about the history of collage in art

Other relevant sources
Read more about the exhibition Henri Matisse – The Colour of Ideas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Discover available works for sale by Henri Matisse on Artland