Matisse Cut-outs

Confined to a wheelchair towards the end of his life, Henri Matisse reinvented himself. This new edition looks at the bright, bold cut-outs with which he created a new medium of art. Discover the history in rare photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson and F. W. Murnau, and with texts by surrealist writer Louis Aragon and Matisse himself. Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life—he was almost 80 years of age—he developed the technique of “carving into color,” creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupées (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. Hardcover, 412 pages.