Matisse, Henri - Icarus (1943)

Falling in the Dark

Matisse was not playing with paper because he wanted a craft project. He was dying. Or at least he thought he was. It was 1943 in occupied France. The Nazis were just outside the door and Matisse was trapped in a bed after surgery left his body ruined and his spirit thin. He couldn’t stand at an easel anymore so he grabbed a pair of heavy tailor scissors and started hacking into pre-painted sheets of gouache. He didn’t bother drawing lines first. He just cut straight into the raw color.

Icarus is usually about a boy who flew too close to the sun and fell. But this version is not just an old myth for children. Look at the black silhouette. It’s heavy and tumbling through a blue sky that feels more like a bruise than a heaven. Those yellow shapes are not stars. They’re anti-aircraft shells exploding in the night sky over a broken France. Matisse sat in his sickbed while the world screamed and he made beauty out of the scraps left behind.

There’s a single red dot pinned to the chest. A heart. Amidst the fall and the fire and the war there is still a pulse. Matisse was carving his way out of a physical prison. He called it drawing with scissors. It was violent and it was graceful all at once. He took the paper and he took the color and he refused to let the darkness have the last word. He did not need a brush to show us what it feels like to fall while your heart is still beating. It was his way of surviving the end of the world.

References

Elderfield, John. The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse. New York: George Braziller, 1978.

Flam, Jack. Matisse on Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Matisse, Henri. Jazz. Paris, Tériade, 1947.

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