"Matisse Paper Cutouts" 1984 GUICHARD-MEILI, Jean

GUICHARD-MEILI, Jean w/ 157 Illustrations, 105 in colour Thames and Hudson 1984 14" x 10 3/8" "At the end of his career Henri Matisse embarked on a new style and a new medium, one that he had previously used only as an aid to planning his large decorative compositions. The paper cutout - or gouache decoupee - is made by cutting shapes out of paper that has been previously colored with poster-color. In Matisse's hands it grew into an autonomous medium, and the artist produced a series of extraordinary masterpieces. Here are fifty of these splendid works, reproduced in full color, full-page or larger, with four of them occupying four-page foldouts. They are accompanied by a critical text in which the author sensitively analyses Matisse's recapture of the simplicity of pure color - which he likens to the spontaneous vision of childhood - and reprints a number of this always intelligent artist's own statements about the new medium. Matisse's paper cutouts, from the prewar Dancers to the Iv