Everything You Need to Know About Henri Matisse’s Cut-Outs

In our current installation Matisse’s Cut-Outs: A Celebration, 10 key works trace the arc of the artist’s last chapter, in which he invented an entirely new medium. Beginning in the 1940s, Henri Matisse used scissors to cut forms out of sheets of paper painted with colorful gouache, and with the help of assistants, pinned them in variable arrangements, which were later mounted. They began on an intimate scale, and eventually blossomed into independent creations that reached environmental proportions. Sometimes they helped Matisse design works in other mediums, such as a resplendent stained-glass window, now on view alongside its cut-out maquette; at other times they remained autonomous creations. Initially derided by one critic as “an agreeable distraction,” the cut-outs have come to captivate audiences with their invigorating color and surprising materiality.

At MoMA these works were first presented in 1951, when Matisse was just experimenting with the new form, and then 10 years later, in a 1961 show not long after the artist’s death. Many of them were reunited five decades later in the exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. For that major undertaking, we produced a website to highlight our research into seemingly simple but, in fact, pretty complex questions like: What is a cut-out? How and why did Matisse make them, and what did it mean when he did? How can we understand their two lives, first as contingent works on the artist’s walls, and then as objects framed up for display? How do they continue to change over time, and what might our conservators do about it?

We’ve gathered a host of resources here that we’ve made over the years. Videos, audio, art-making activities, and other features below pay tribute to, and grapple with, these beautiful, radical works that resonate as deeply today as they did when Matisse first, as he described it, “cut directly into vivid color.”

—Samantha Friedman, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints