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Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
HENRI MATISSE Cirque.
Color pochoir on cream wove paper, 1947. 360x550 mm; 14 1/4x21 3/4 inches, full margins. From the deluxe edition of 100, aside from the book edition of 270 and before the center fold. Published by Tériade, Paris. From Jazz. A superb impression with vibrant colors.
In the latter years of his life, after a battle with cancer and eventual confinement to a wheelchair in 1941, Matisse (1869-1954) lost a portion of his mobility and focused his practice on creating images using paper cut-outs. One of his first fully-realized works to utilize this technique were the 20 prints for the illustrated book entitled Jazz. The prints in Jazz replicated the original paper cut-outs through pochoir, a fine stencil technique that mimicked the texture and complexity of the cut-out technique. The portfolio ushered in a new era in the artist's oeuvre, as he moved away from oil painting to fully embrace cut-outs. Matisse appreciated the simplification of the method, which allowed him to "draw directly into the color."
The majority of the prints from Jazz were inspired by the theater, folklore and the circus, and are accompanied by pages of large handwritten text on the artist's thoughts and inspiration from music. The title Jazz is intended to engender themes of improvisation and energy. The planes of pure color and bold abstracted forms present in Matisse's Jazz pochoirs are cited as a major influence on the following generation of artists that proscribed to similar "hard-edged" abstraction. Duthuit Books 22.
