Jazz

Henri Matisse’s Jazz is an artist’s book originally published in 1947 by the art publisher Tériade. The images in Jazz originated as cut-paper collages, which became Matisse’s primary medium after a 1941 surgery left him with restricted mobility. Matisse’s vibrant cut-paper collages were then transformed into prints using a stencil print process called pochoir and assembled to create the book. In all, Jazz contains 20 brightly-colored prints and 70 pages of poetic texts that relate to the circus and the theater, broad themes like love and death, and recollections of an influential trip the artist took to Tahiti in 1930. While the book’s title suggests the book is about music, Matisse chose the name to reflect the improvisational technique he used to create his original collages, akin to jazz musicians.