Matisse - Icarus

plate VIII from the illustrated book, "Jazz”

1947 41.9 x 26 cm MET NY

This bold and playful image is one of twenty plates Matisse created

to illustrate his groundbreaking book "Jazz." The illustrations derive

from maquettes of cut and pasted colored papers, which were then

printed using a stencil technique known as "pochoir." Here, the

mythological figure Icarus is presented in a simplified form floating

against a royal blue nighttime sky. Matisse's flat, abstracted forms

and large areas of pure color marked an important change in the

direction of his later work and ultimately influenced "hard-edge"

artists of the 1960s like Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held.

1945