How Henri Matisse Learned to Draw With Scissors

In January 1941, Henri Matisse was wheeled into a hospital in Lyon for surgery that his doctors did not expect him to survive. He was 71. The operation, for cancer, saved his life but left him largely confined to a bed and a wheelchair, his hands too unsteady for the sustained physical work that oil painting demanded. Friends and critics assumed his career, already four decades old, was effectively over.

It was not. What followed instead was the final act of Matisse's work — and by most accounts, the one that shaped the way the twentieth century thought about color and form more than anything he had made before.

Drawing With Scissors

Unable to stand at an easel, Matisse began working from bed and from a wheelchair, directing assistants to paint large sheets of paper with pure, saturated gouache. He then cut directly into those painted sheets with tailor's shears, pinning the resulting shapes to the walls of his studio and rearranging them, sometimes for weeks, before a composition was fixed. He called it "dessiner aux ciseaux" — drawing with scissors.

It was a strange inversion of how art was supposed to be made. Drawing usually comes before color; here, the color came first, and the drawing was the act of cutting it away. Matisse later described the palette he reached for in this period as "vivid and violent" — a description that fits the work: flat, saturated blues, reds and greens, cut into shapes that feel both spontaneous and exact.

Between 1943 and 1947, this method produced "Jazz," a portfolio of twenty prints reproducing his cut-outs through pochoir, a hand-stencilling process. The subjects were circus performers, swimmers, a falling figure titled "Icarus" — ostensibly playful imagery. But "Jazz" was made in occupied France, during a war that had already touched Matisse's own family directly. Read against that backdrop, the brightness of the work reads less like escapism and more like defiance.

A Chapel Built From Paper

The cut-out technique reached its largest scale a few years later, when a community of Dominican nuns in the town of Vence, in the south of France, asked Matisse to design a chapel for them — not just a painting or a mural, but the entire space: stained glass, ceramic tile murals, even the priests' vestments. Matisse, by then in his late seventies and still working largely from a wheelchair, treated the commission as a single unified composition. He planned the stained-glass windows the same way he had planned "Jazz": with paper shapes, pinned up, moved, reconsidered, before a single piece of colored glass was cut. The Chapelle du Rosaire was consecrated in 1951. Matisse himself called it his masterpiece, ranking it above paintings he had spent a lifetime making.

He kept working this way until his death in 1954, cutting shapes that grew larger and simpler as he did — the swimmer, the leaf, the human silhouette reduced to a single confident outline. Critics who had once treated the cut-outs as a diminished substitute for "real" painting eventually came to see them as the opposite: not a retreat forced by illness, but a genuine invention, arguably the most radical thing Matisse ever made.

It's a strange kind of consolation, seventy-odd years later, that the shapes born out of a hospital bed in Lyon are now some of the most recognizable in modern art — reproduced, referenced, and yes, printed onto everyday objects like the mugs in our Henri Matisse Collection. Matisse couldn't stand at an easel anymore. He picked up scissors instead, and changed what people meant by drawing.