The Dreams of a Dying Artist are On Our Walls

As I walked into a college dorm room last week, I was faced with a familiar sight. Over the bed hung two posters that I have gotten to know quite well over my almost three semesters at college. The posters in question are of Matisse’s cutouts: wiggly figures between the vegetal and the abstract that have absurdly become part of the key iconography of a trendy, similarly wiggly aesthetic. It is the aesthetic that has given the wavy Ultrafragola mirror by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass a new life on the feeds of influencers and has graced us with the wavy candlestick, wavy vase, and wavy rug. This revived 1970s style flourished during the COVID19 quarantine as people spent much time getting style inspiration from the internet and considered redecorating the boring, strikingly un-wavy homes that they now could not escape. In fact, this aesthetic may be seen as a form of cheerful escapism during extraordinarily uncheerful times. After all, it was Matisse who said that “Art is an escape from reality.” It is an escape that has been sought widely, and, unsurprisingly, by the inhabitant of the college dorm room. Since a poster of Matisse’s cutouts is now even more accessible, with a 12-piece set costing under $15.00 on Amazon, it makes sense that it would become a quintessential dorm room decoration, one that adds fun color and shape to hardly cozy cinder block walls. 

While the popularity of the trend does not surprise me, the fascination with Matisse does. The cutouts’ bold look is definitely appealing, but the story behind these artworks seems incongruent with the light-hearted, escapist nature of the retro aesthetic to which they now belong. 

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Hentri Matisse, the famed French Post-Impressionist artist, invented the cutout in his late sixties, during the late 1930s. His poor health prevented him from painting, so he turned to the method of cutting painted paper into shapes. These shapes acquired a characteristic abstract look as the unrefined scissors and the artist’s weak hands made the surrender to fluid form inevitable. The cutouts renewed Matisse’s commitment to the depiction of hidden natural truth and constituted a moving finale to his continually inventive body of work. 

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The obvious distinction between Matisse’s cutouts and the widely reproduced poster is that the former represents a groundbreaking shift in the depiction of modern form while the latter is hardly innovative. However, this is often the case with mass-reproduced posters of famous artwork. The incompatibility of the context in which the cutouts were produced and the context in which they are admired today goes far beyond a shift from the original to the ordinary.  

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The cutouts are the creations of an artist who was mostly confined to his bed and wheelchair. No longer able to visit the places that brought him joy, Matisse instead recreated his fondest memories in art. His 1952 The Parakeet and the Mermaid was based off of a trip to Tahiti. It is a lively assemblage of vegetal shapes somewhere in between leaves and corals that surround the blue bird and mermaid—shapes many will recognize from trendy posters.

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Matisse remarked that this piece was “a little garden all around [him] where [he could] walk” while confined to his studio in France. While Matisse’s plants are cheerful, colorful memories of a beloved place, and are meant to be admired as such, they will also always be two-dimensional reproductions of the memories of a dying artist. In fact, a plausibly unhappy artist. Matisse’s life in and after the 1940s was weighted with tragedy. After more than four decades of marriage, his wife divorced him following an emotional affair between the artist and one of his models, he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer and underwent grueling surgery, and had to flee his beloved homes in Paris and Nice during WWII. As an old man now dedicated to decoupage, in great pain and restricted to limited movements, he was left to reconcile the greatness of his past life, past loves, and past ability for artistic creation. His bright shapes are burdened with meaning: they carry not just the ultimate message of an old innovator, but are heavy with his lost loves and bittersweet memories. They are big, vibrant dreams that are merely cut out of paper—dreams that now absurdly hang on the walls of many people.

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(Cover Image: A man observes Henri Matisse’s The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952), via The New York Times)