Between 1943 and 1947, while recovering from major surgery and largely confined to his apartment in Vence, Henri Matisse developed the cut-out technique that would define the final decade of his life. Working with sheets of paper painted in pure gouache and a pair of scissors, he found he could draw directly in colour — bypassing the hand and working instead with the whole body. Jazz, published by Tériade in 1947, was the first public exhibition of this method: twenty plates combining cut-out images with pages of Matisse's own handwriting, printed in facsimile to preserve the intimacy of the original notebooks.
Icarus — plate VIII of Jazz — shows a dark silhouetted figure falling against a field of deep blue, its heart rendered as a single red burst. The myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on wings of feather and wax, becomes in Matisse's hands not a cautionary tale but an image of pure aspiration. Alongside it, in his distinctive cursive, Matisse wrote: "Mes courbes ne sont pas folles. Le fil à plomb en déterminant la direction verticale forme avec son opposé l'horizontale" — "My curves are not random. The plumb line, in determining the vertical direction, forms its opposite, the horizontal." The mug reproduces both the image and this handwritten passage from the 1960 facsimile edition.
Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.
Henri Matisse, Jazz, 1947, lithograph print (1960 facsimile edition). Public domain.
