Art: The Sultan and the Scissors

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Forty years earlier in his career, Matisse had demonstrated, with his big canvases of dancing figures, that he was a master of energetic motion. There is a clear difference, though, between the degree of energy that a pencil or brush can express and the kind of incisive force that the bite of his scissors gave to Matisse's later image of a figure in ecstatic movement, La Danseuse, 1949. The directness of such a cut-out could not be repeated in paint. No drawn profile could approach the strictness of a cut edge, and the paper has its own density as palpable substance—which accounts for the peculiarly sculptural look of some of Matisse's blue cut-outs of nudes, such as the Woman with Amphora and Pomegranates, 1953.

"One must study an object a long tune," Matisse remarked in 1951, "to know what its sign is." The signs he developed in the cut-outs are a testament to his gift for preserving the ebullience of nature in a medium that naturally moved toward decorative formality.

The cut-outs are Matisse's last resolution of two visions of nature that were woven into his birthright as a painter: the European heritage of symbols. One was the artificial paradise garden, whose chief example (for Matisse) was the Alhambra in Granada—nature tamed, formalized and patterned to the highest degree of artifice and comfort. A work like the Large Decoration with Masks, 1953, with its repeated gridwork of leaves and cloves, alludes directly to Arabic tilework. But the other prototype was the vision of the natural paradise, exemplified since the 18th century by Tahiti. Matisse had gone to Tahiti in 1930, finding it "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature.

To say that Matisse was obsessed with dialogue between nature and culture is, perhaps, to say no more than that he was a painter. But the intensity of that conversation between perceived and stylized form in the cut-outs renders them heroic. They are the climax of the symbolist tradition in France, and may be the greatest works of visual art in that tradition.

Their context is a remark by Stephane Mallarme: "The intellectual core of a poem conceals itself, is present—is active—in the blank space which separates the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a pregnant silence, no less wonderful to compose than the lines themselves."

The fields on which Matisse strewed his cut-out nouns of shape—ivy leaf, diver, parakeet, dancer—work in the same way. They are not backgrounds; they are an enveloping fluid, a space that seems as active as its contents but, being "unpainted," is wholly different. Every painter since 1950 has had to reckon with the peculiar void Matisse invented with his cutouts. Not one has equaled their suppleness as décor, or their episodic grandeur as painting.

—Robert Hughes