The Graphic Matisse

Through the presentation of a corpus of printed works, the exhibition “Matisse, comme un roman” traces the emergence, in the artist’s practice, of a new “optical culture that takes shape with Jazz, and whose visual influence and reach can be traced as far as the graphic design of the 1980s”, in the words of the exhibition’s curator, Aurélie Verdier.

Brush-lettered titles for the journal Roman; the lively interplay of letters and colours cut from paper for Fauves (Georges Duthuit), Apollinaire (André Rouveyre), and Verve (no 8, “Symphonie chromatique”); the duplication of motifs in Prestiges de Matisse (André Verdet); or again the overlapping squares and crosses of the catalogue Matisse: His Art and His Public (1951)…

In its very spareness, the cover of the Verve issue devoted to the reedition of a fifteenth-century manuscript, Cœur d’amour épris, offers a fitting point of departure for understanding this apparent break with the painter’s more classical illustrations, produced for Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and Montherlant.

On the book’s outer cover, Matisse’s cut-out “heart”, encircled by hand-rendered lettering, at first glance seems to have lost any aesthetic connection with the splendid miniatures by Barthélémy d’Eyck reproduced inside the volume. As if it had been lifted from one of the illuminations, enlarged, and placed with disarming simplicity at the centre of the cover, the symbol is wrenched from the past and inscribed within a contemporary visual culture – one that calls to mind American graphic and advertising design more readily than the courtly love of centuries past.

Several images come to mind: the eyes from Saul Bass’s poster for the film Bonjour Tristesse (1958), the hieratic love-themed silkscreens and distorted letterforms of Sister Corita Kent, and, of course, the viral “I ♥ NY” campaign designed by the legendary Milton Glaser in 1976.

An equally striking kinship between Matisse’s cut-outs and the language of graphic design can be found in the work of Paul Rand. The designer – who notably helped shape IBM’s corporate identity – produced in 1957 a silkscreen poster that reads like a distant cousin of Cœur d’amour épris (A Red Heart Enclosed in a Beige Circle).

Rand’s admiration for Jazz comes as no surprise: he purchased two copies of the book in the late 1940s. As Milton Glaser observed in Paul Rand: Modernist Design (Baltimore County, 2003):

“Matisse’s cut-outs from the last years of his life were among the most profound and enduring influences on Rand’s work. Their presence is so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine he could have overlooked them. In many ways, the cut-outs were the medium most closely aligned with his own approach to illustration. Indeed, nearly every illustrator who has worked with cut paper as a graphic language seems, in one way or another, indebted to Matisse.”

Matisse’s cut-outs from the last years of his life were among the most profound and enduring influences on Rand’s work. […] Indeed, nearly every illustrator who has worked with cut paper as a graphic language seems, in one way or another, indebted to Matisse.
Milton Glaser

On this point, Glaser dispels a common misconception: however innovative it may be, Matisse’s late printed work is that of a brilliant illustrator rather than a graphic designer in the modern sense of the term – one whose role is to conceive visual identities or editorial objects structured around commercial imperatives and shaped by industrial processes of design and production.

If illustrator-designers could scarcely escape Matisse’s influence in the 1940s and 1950s, Matisse himself could hardly have ignored the rise of a graphic and advertising culture that had become omnipresent in the everyday landscape of twentieth-century Europe – from city streets to railway stations and the national roads cutting across the French countryside.

Did the painter not remark, as early as 1929, in reference to advertising imagery and the search for a certain pictorial reduction of forms into signs, that “a hand indicates the way less effectively than an arrow”?

It is worth remembering that cutting and collage are perhaps the two most fundamental techniques to master in a modern graphic or advertising studio – well before Matisse’s gouache cut-outs, and at least since the interwar years, with the emergence of photomontage.

Immersed in these logics of montage and benefiting from innovations in printing – photolithography in particular – typographers and advertisers began to take new liberties in the articulation of text and image, bringing the design of book covers and dust jackets closer to that of silkscreen posters. The exterior of the book gradually freed itself from the typographic orthodoxy governing the interior pages of the traditional volume. The emergence of a new pictorial space, constructed from heterogeneous cut elements, must therefore be sought as much among professionals of print and advertising as among painters.

The inventiveness of Paul Rand’s compositions should not be understood as that of a so-called “applied art” derived from a supposed “high art”, but rather as a contemporary manifestation of a new, shared optical culture that reinvents typographic space. The critic Steven Heller notes that the use of cut paper and collage appears in the designer’s work as early as the 1930s and 1940s, as evidenced by the art direction of the magazines Apparel Arts and Direction. Through the boldness and experimental character of their layouts, these publications reveal a deep affinity with “magazines such as Verve and Minotaure (by Matisse and Picasso) and the magazine […] Transition (by Miró), which Rand cited among his influences”, as Steven Heller writes in Paul Rand (London: Phaidon, 1999).

In the 1940s, the use of paper that was not only cut (as in Matisse) but also torn became emblematic of a new popular visual culture – one that emerged alongside the rise of a graphic design driven by confidently commercial and industrial ambitions, while pushing against the conventions of axial typography inherited from the Renaissance, with its centred compositions.

In the Netherlands, the graphic designer Willem Sandberg even turned this approach into a style and a compositional method: “When I can’t find what I need in the printer’s type specimen”, Sandberg said, “I tear shapes from coloured paper. I prefer to use the lining of envelopes. By tearing the paper I escape hard contours and benefit from chance – which I do not believe in.”

Although this torn-paper aesthetic departs from the crisp precision of Matisse’s cut-outs, Sandberg – director of the Stedelijk Museum from 1945 to 1962 – produced one of the most compelling printed interpretations of Matisse’s Blue Nudes (Henri Matisse, Les Grandes Gouaches découpées, 1960).

Here, the play of material and scissor cuts disappears in favour of forming homogeneous colour fields – contrasting planes set against the stark white of a double page stripped of any textual trace. The designer replaces the “Matisse blue” of the cut gouaches – which, straight from the paint tube, possessed nothing inherently magical – with a tone closer to cyan, suited to offset printing.

Matisse would likely have appreciated this graphic transposition, which moves away from faithful reproduction in order to remain truer to the radical spirit of this period, one that sought to condense forms into genuine visual signs. “Each work,” he wrote in Ses propos et écrits sur l’art with regard to the cut-outs, “is a set of signs invented during its execution.”