This education kit was produced for the 2015 exhibition Matisse and the moderns at the Art Gallery of NSW. It presents a selection of focus works from the exhibition along with issues for consideration for students in K-12.

Click on an image for more information and to view the work in the Gallery collection.

The Gallery recently acquired Henri Matisse’s illustrated book Jazz 1947, one of the most famous graphic works of the 20th century.

In Matisse’s first major ‘cut-out’ project, realism and abstraction are finally reconciled at the end of a life-long tension. With the cut-out technique, Matisse felt he had finally solved the problems of form and space, outline and colour. ‘It is not a beginning, it is an endpoint’, the artist stated.

Matisse’s formal experimentation began five decades earlier, when he and his peers rejected their impressionist heritage and discovered the work of three essential ‘forgotten’ artists – Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. Pictorial innovations, including fauvism and cubism, soon followed.

Matisse and Pablo Picasso played the most significant roles in this drive toward modernity, despite their very different trajectories and personalities. A selection of works by both artists are displayed in this exhibition alongside other key paintings from the Gallery’s collection, offering an opportunity to appreciate the new horizons that they opened up and the reasons for their lasting influence on modern and contemporary art.

Questions and activities

What is the importance of the acquisition of Jazz for the state collection? How will it benefit audiences that come to the Gallery? With Jazz as the basis to your argument, debate the purpose of a state art collection and what it should reflect.

Describe Matisse’s material practice. How did his artmaking style evolve? How does Jazz reflect the end of his life-long journey?

Compare the art practice of Matisse to one of the other artists in the exhibition, looking at similarities and differences in their approaches. What qualities make these artists ‘modern’?

Questions and activities

Describe the visual language Matisse has used to convey his subject matter. Why do you think he has used text and images?

Research jazz as a musical form. Do you think Matisse has captured its essence in this work?

Who was involved in creating Jazz? Define the role of the artist, artwork and audience in this work. How does this work challenge your understanding of art?

Jazz comprises a set of 20 colour stencils and over 70 pages of calligraphic writing, which can be seen nearby. Jazz was pivotal in Matisse’s transition from oil painting to the cut-out collages that dominated the last decade of his life. To create these works, Matisse cut forms out of large sheets of paper previously painted with gouache by his assistants. The cut-outs were then assembled on the wall of Matisse’s studio, under his direction.

The compositions selected for Jazz were entrusted to the colour specialist Edmond Vairel to be turned into stencils. These were then printed with the same vivid gouaches used by Matisse. The cover and text pages were printed separately by Draeger Frères in Paris. Jazz was published by Tériade in an edition of 250.

The book’s title evokes the idea of a musical structure of rhythm and repetition, expressed through the handwritten text, which is broken by the explosive improvisations of the colour plates. Matisse’s subjects are taken largely from the circus, mythology and memories of his travels. They represent either isolated figures or paired forms that suggest a dialogue between artist and model. Despite the vivid colours and folkloric themes, few of the plates are actually cheerful. Several are among Matisse’s most ominous images.

Matisse's and Picasso's graphic work illustrates another aspect of their prodigious creativity. Unlike Picasso who sustained a continuous interest in printmaking, Matisse concentrated his efforts into relatively short periods.

In his early career, Picasso worked exclusively in the techniques of etching and drypoint, of which The frugal repast 1904 is a prime example. On the other hand, the fauve Matisse was attracted to the bold, simplified qualities of woodcut, as seen in Three-quarter-length nude 1906.

A return to classical order characterised both artists’ work between the wars. From the early 1920s, many of Matisse’s paintings and lithographs explored the exotic theme of the odalisque, derived from 19th-century French academic art. Picasso’s neo-classical manner, which emphasised pure outline, is shown in several etchings from his Vollard suite, produced between 1930 and 1936, shown in the exhibition.

Picasso’s use of lithography was minimal until a period of intense experimentation in the mid 1940s, coinciding with new subject matter and a more expressive handling. The large, stylised portrait Head of a woman 1948 is of the artist’s muse and lover Françoise Gilot.

Questions and activities

Why do you think Matisse and Picasso chose to explore the medium of printmaking? Compare the printmaking techniques used by each artist, and consider why they may have chosen those particular approaches.

Describe the emotional qualities of these two works by Matisse and Picasso. How are these qualities enhanced by the structural elements? Does the choice of medium also play a role?

Choose a piece from your body of work to re-create as a print. Compare the original to the print. What does each approach bring to the overall effect? Discuss which approach you feel is more successful, and why.

Paul Cézanne spent much of 1888 in Paris and at this time painted a group of landscapes representing views of the river Marne. Believing colour and form to be inseparable, the painter attempted to emphasise structure and solidity in his work. The monumental impression given by Banks of the Marne depends on the stability of the composition and its architectonic sequence of horizontal bands. It also conveys a great sense of balance and harmony in the distribution of colour.

Questions and activities

Unpack what it means to say that colour and form are inseparable. Do you agree?

Create a series of work based on landscape using a similar approach to Cézanne's. How does this compare to the way you usually create art?

What influence did Cézanne have on the next generation of artists in the 20th century? Why was his art practice considered so innovative?

Pablo Picasso painted this powerful assemblage of a dislocated and distorted nude in the studio of his new villa at Cannes in the south of France at the age of 75. Matisse’s recent death may have reminded Picasso of the inescapability of his own mortality when he created this violent image. The painting’s scale, the division of the flat background, the colours, sense of light, decorative chair and the tree through the window, are all reminiscent of Matisse’s great last series of interiors.

Questions and activities

What do you think Picasso is trying to communicate to his audience in this work? How does form, scale, line and colour add meaning?

Create a body of work as a homage to Matisse. Consider his material and conceptual practice when creating your work.

Research Matisse’s last series of interiors. How do they compare to Picasso’s Nude in a rocking chair?

Georges Braque was much influenced by the posthumous Cézanne retrospective in 1906, taking to heart the artist’s advice to ‘approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’. He began to paint landscapes which, when exhibited in Paris in November 1908, elicited the comment from one critic, ‘Mr Braque reduces everything ... to cubes’. Thus was coined the name of the artistic movement that Braque, alongside Picasso, developed in the ensuing years: cubism. The palette of browns, greens and blues is already, at this date, quintessentially cubist.

Questions and activities

Using Landscape with houses as an example, describe how Braque’s body of work is the ’next step’ from Cézanne.

Create an artwork with a limited colour palette. What is the effect of this approach?

Learn about cubism and the role it played in the history of Western art. Create a visual timeline of this period. Has this art style influenced artists today? Discuss.

With Matisse and André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck was one of the principal artists of the group who, inspired by Van Gogh, began using colour with an unprecedented ferocity. This led to their being dubbed the ‘fauves’ (literally wild beasts). Another version of this view by Vlaminck, in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, includes a bridge in the background. The differences between the two paintings show that the artist was more concerned with expressing intense emotion through pure colour, than the scene itself.

Questions and activities

Describe how colour and emotion are intertwined in this artwork. What do you think is Vlaminick's intention in this work?

Create an artwork that is emotionally charged with colour. Write a statement to describe your aims.

Develop a case study on colour in 20th-century art. In what way did the Fauves contribute? How did Vlaminck, Matisse and Derain approach colour in their art practice?

From the late 1920s, the French cubist painter Fernand Léger sought to relieve his art from the decorative and return to a more formal approach. Using bold, defined shapes and odd juxtapositions of objects, he seems to focus attention on his obsession with contrasts between colours, as well as between natural and manufactured forms, seen as parts or complete. Suspended in ethereal space, Léger’s objects, including this bicycle, are brought together in connections that seem inexplicable and mysterious. Dr HV Evatt, a prominent Australian Labor politician and leading patron of modernist art, acquired this painting from the historic Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art during its Australian tour in 1939.

Questions and activities

How do Léger's ideas inform his artistic practice?

Create your own series of work based on manufactured and natural forms and contrasting colours.

Collect examples of Léger's work. How is his obsession with contrasts visually represented in his art?

A reclusive man, Giorgio Morandi devoted himself to the contemplation of a collection of familiar, everyday objects that he assembled over many years. He arranged and depicted these items in numerous natura morta (still lifes) with great subtlety and delicacy, thus developing an intimate approach to painting. In the end, Morandi’s silent art is enigmatic and can even be meditative.

Questions and activities

What makes Morandi's paintings 'enigmatic' and 'meditative'?

Create your own natura morta. Think about how your choice of objects, their colour and arrangement, can represent your personality.

Why has Morandi's work been described as 'silent art'? How does this compare to Matisse's Jazz series?