Matisse in miniature

Henri Matisse's art books showcase the astonishing 'painting with scissors' technique he adopted at the end of his life, and the vision of light and colour he dreamed of as a boy, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

MOST OF US, when we have a bout of insomnia, might take herbal sleeping tablets or watch rubbish television. Not Henri Matisse. At the age of 72, following a colostomy operation that left him bedridden, wakeful and in constant pain, the French painter took up a pair of scissors and proceeded to make great art out of simple pieces of coloured paper. In 1947 he published Jazz,a collection of geometric cut-outs accompanied by his handwritten musings on life and art. Several of these images – showing Icarus, for example, falling to earth through the stars, or the comical, sinister Sword Swallower – are among the most iconic in contemporary culture, reproduced over and over again as emblems of a playful, irreverent modernist approach to the visual arts.

Now we have the opportunity to see them in the flesh, as it were, along with a selection of other graphic work by Matisse in the Art Books of Henri Matisse exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The exhibition will place two artist books by Matisse from the Chester Beatty's collection – one featuring poems by the 15th-century poet Charles D'Orléans, the other featuring James Joyce's Ulysses– alongside four books from the extensive art collection of Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Jazz; Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos; Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé(The Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé); and a second copy of the D'Orléans book.

I’ve been invited to watch as the latter are unpacked. They’ve been shipped in the kind of unassuming wooden crates that often contain dishwashers or other large domestic appliances. To open the crates the Chester Beatty’s head of conservation, Jessica Robinson, produces an electric screwdriver. It whirrs alarmingly but does the job in a second. Safely inside, suspended close together but not touching, are the famous pages. They’ve been framed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch for this exhibition, but as the director of the Chester Beatty, Fionnuala Croke, explains, they were intended as high-quality books.

“Artists’ books began to see the light of day in France around 1900,” she says. “It was often savvy art publishers who saw a market for these beautiful things, and commissioned artists such as Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse to make them. There’s all kinds of academic debate about the relationship between the writer and the artist – should they have equal weighting? Are they works of art in themselves? – and the finished books vary hugely. But it’s always a dialogue between the visual and the text, and the totality is the important thing. The typeface, the paper, everything is always very carefully thought out. They are really deluxe, exquisitely finished limited-edition items.”

Although he worked mainly on poetic texts, Matisse didn’t seek to illustrate the words in a straightforward way. “Instead, he saw his work as an extension of the text in a different medium – as if the image and the text were part of the same concept.” It all sounds quite complicated until you see the works. They make perfect visual sense in an age accustomed to magazine layouts and the multidimensional space that is the online blog, of which these are arguably the precursor.

Unpacked from his crate and laid out on a table for inspection, Icarus looks smaller than I had imagined him. But the blue of his sky is exactly what I had expected, which, according to the exhibition curator Jill Unkel, can be explained by the extraordinary lengths taken by the printer of Jazzto ensure Matisse's jewel-like gouache colours were reproduced with the greatest possible precision. Several techniques were tried and rejected before they decided on pochoirs,or hand-cut stencils; the paint was brushed directly through the stencils, allowing them to reproduce the rich colours and layers in Matisse's models.

Cutting and pasting is, as every child knows, a delightful activity. But Matisse’s cut-outs are to our family scrapbooks as Bank of America Merrill Lynch is to a piggy bank. How did he do it? The fact that he was a visionary and a painter of technical genius helped. But so did his background. He was born in Bohain, in northern France, a town famous for high-end textile production. His ancestors were weavers and he spent his childhood in an ancient, and by all accounts leaky, weaver’s cottage.

In a marvellous essay on Matisse in the New York Review of Books his biographer Hilary Spurling notes that the weavers of Bohain were famous throughout France, not just for the richness of their colours but for the boldness of their designs.

“Their work looked to compatriots like a fireworks display,” she writes. “This is the vision of light and colour Matisse said he dreamed of as a boy, and finally managed to recapture as an art in the great stained-glass windows based on semi-abstract designs of cut-and-painted paper which he produced at the end of his life.” Matisse referred to the technique as “painting with scissors”, but only someone accustomed to the precision cutting of the high-end tailor would be able to manipulate scissors so skilfully.

Jill Unkel suggests another textile connection. “In Tahiti, where Matisse had travelled earlier in his life, there’s a type of quilt where they cut out a pattern, then tack it to the wall before they sew it,” she says. “And that’s what he did.”

His assistants would first paint the paper to be used in strong, clean gouache colours. Matisse would cut his shapes from the coloured paper; the designs would be tacked to the wall and moved around until he was happy with the result. It’s like high-art fuzzy felt, and the spontaneity and playfulness of the technique are reflected in the book’s title.

“It’s not so much about the music itself as about its improvisatory quality,” says Unkel. “And it’s the perfect title for this collection. Originally he had planned that it would be a series of images connected to the circus. Then he added some lagoons based on those he had seen in Tahiti through a glass-bottomed boat. The handwritten text was a bit of an afterthought.”

Jazz, as the title suggests, is full of surprises. It’s also the only book in this exhibition that uses the cut-out technique. The Mallarmé volume, which dates from 1931, uses very thin, very even black lines etched on a white background to evoke the symbolist poet’s elusive, almost icy aesthetic and his conviction that the white space around the poem is the most important thing. Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos does the opposite, using white lines etched on a black background to tell the dark, anxiety-driven story of the Greek queen’s passion for a bull, and the subsequent birth of the bull-headed Minotaur. The Charles D’Orléans books, meanwhile, are filled with flowers; Matisse used repeated fleur-de-lys motifs in different colours, and surrounded the poet’s medieval ballads and sonnets with suitably courtly garlands and scrolls. The copy belonging to the Chester Beatty Library is inscribed as a gift from Matisse to Chester Beatty.

“We think they were quite friendly,” Unkel says. “Chester Beatty had a house in the same posh area in the south of France that Matisse did, and Mrs Chester Beatty had purchased a couple of his paintings already.”

We finish with a look at the illustrated copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which was bought by the library in 2009. Matisse based his illustrations on Homer’s original; they are stark and stylised, but the publisher was inspired to include Matisse’s sketches in the book as well, which shows how the drawings were pared back as the artist went along. “This,” says Unkel, donning a pair of protective gloves, placing the book on a protective pillow and opening it with a triumphant flourish, “is Calypso.” We gaze, fascinated, at a tangle of arms, legs and breasts. The texture is as delicate, as apparently ephemeral, as cocoa on a cappuccino.

This may be Matisse in miniature, but it’s no less astonishing for that.

Plan your visit

Art Books of Henri Matisse is at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle, from Thursday until September 25th. Admission is free.

A series of lectures, tours and workshops will run throughout the summer, including some public lectures: Matisse and the Decorative Arts (June 2nd), Equilibrium and Arabesque: The Art Books of Henri Matisse (July 21st) and Matisse and the Art of Book Illustration (July 28th).

Jill Unkel will also host guided tours of the show on June 1st and July 20th; cbl.ie.

Interpreting Icarus: A resonance for every age

The story of Icarus, the Greek boy who soared to the heavens on a set of handmade wings only to plunge to his death when the wax melted in the heat of the sun, is truly mythic, in that it has resonance for every age.

Perhaps that’s why Matisse’s silent, geometric figure is so eloquent. It has been speculated that the artist intended the image of the man falling through stars to refer to the many airmen killed during the battles of the second World War, but it can just as easily evoke the idea of Adam’s fall from the perfection of heaven to the painful realities of earthly existence. To contemporary eyes it is also reminiscent of the photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

Finally, Icarus can be seen as the elderly Matisse, forced to wear a metal corset and plagued, in addition to intestinal cancer, by gallstones, liver problems and deteriorating vision that left him unable to paint, yet still defiantly spreading his broken artistic wings. As he told a friend, “Truly, I’m not joking when I thank my lucky stars for the awful operation I had, since it has made me young again and philosophical, which means that I don’t want to fritter away the new lease on life I’ve been given.”