Two lithographic posters from the Master of Color

Seriograph. L'Algue Verte. Lombreuil, France: Éditions de Nouvelles Images, 1964.

29.5 x 18.9 in.

This silkscreen poster was produced in 1964 for an exhibition of cut-outs by Henri Matisse at the Musee de Saint-Etienne in France. The image chosen for the show was L'Algue Verte, created in 1953, as one of the artist’s last series of “papiers collés” before his death in 1954. “Papier collé” is used to refer specifically to the paper collages of the Cubists and the modernists. The difference between collage and papier collé is that the latter refers exclusively to the use of paper, while the former may incorporate other two-dimensional (non-paper) components. The craftsman in charge of carefully reproducing this work was Henri Deschamps, one of Mourlot's master printers who had worked closely with Matisse since 1937 at the studio.

Seriograph. carrés rouge sur fond jaune. Lombreuil, France: Éditions de Nouvelles Images, 1971. 

29.5 x 18.9 in.; light creasing along left edge.

After a cancer-related surgery in 1943 limited his ability to stand in front of an easel, Matisse changed his primary medium from oil painting to gouaches découpés, or, forms cut directly from card stock painted with watercolor. Matisse was ridiculed initially for the new technique, which he called “drawing with scissors” and “cutting into color,” but by the time of the consecration of the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence in 1952, the cut-outs had surpassed his painting production in terms of popular appeal, and today they are, for better or for worse, remembered as his signature style.