Footnotes

Henri Matisse's illustrated book, Jazz, published in 1947, is arguably one of the most important and formative works of the artist's career. The colourful portfolio, made up of 20 plates and over 70 pages of calligraphic writing, was one of Matisse's first major 'cut-out' projects and marked a crucial transition into a new medium for the artist.
Matisse began creating the plates in around 1941 after he had undergone a life-saving surgery to alleviate his abdominal cancer, an operation which left him chair and bed-ridden for months. No longer able to paint or draw, Matisse took to cutting forms out of large colourfully painted sheets of paper, prepared for him by his assistants – a process he called 'drawing with scissors'. This suite of colour plates was then printed using a labour-intensive technique, known as pochoir, which allowed Matisse to express his creativity with the help of printer, Edmond Vairel, who created the stencils for his final compositions.
Matisse said "paper cut-out allows me to draw in colour. It is, for me, a matter of simplification ... I draw directly into the colour, which is all the more controlled in that it is not transposed. This simplification guarantees a precision in the reunion of the two means, which brings them together as one."
Through Jazz, Matisse solved many of the problems around space, form, line, and colour that he had struggled with all his life. The work, initially titled Le Cirque after the inspiration behind the illustrations, was later changed to Jazz following a suggestion from his publisher Tériade. The artist welcomed the idea and recognised the noticeable synthesis between art and music throughout the work. Invented in the spirit of improvisation, there is a spontaneity and rhythm through the pages of handwritten lyrical text, broken up by Matisse's expressive plates of mythological depictions, circus scenes and memories from Matisse's travels.
Jazz is still regarded as one of Matisse's greatest masterpieces and his most successful artist's book. As Tériade pointed out:
''Of all the books by Matisse, Jazz is without a doubt the most important: it provokes a true revolution in the artist's oeuvre and in the history of contemporary art''
Michel Anthonioz, Hommage Tériade, Paris, 1973, p. 125.
Yet Matisse never envisioned Jazz to be an illustrated book but rather a collection of artistic plates.