Matisse had started his adult life by studying law, graduating in 1888 and working as a clerk in a law firm. But complications arising out of an operation on his appendix in 1890 meant that he was confined to bed, and it was during this time of convalescence that a fellow patient, a director of a textile factory, suggested he take up painting.  Deciding to give up law he attended the École Quentin-Latour which specialised in textile design, then went to Paris, failed the entrance exam for the Beaux Arts but was admitted to the studio of the artist Gustave Moreau who, while artistically fascinated by Symbolism’s more occult-erotic aspects, was relatively open minded when it came to engaging with new movements such as Impressionism. Symbolism, with its emphasis on interiority of feelings, was at its height during Matisse’s art student days. Art Nouveau, a rear guard reaction to modernity that attempted to create a universal style based on the organic serpentine line, inspired many of the foremost artists and designers to overturn the hierarchies between high and low art and between fine art and the decorative arts. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that mural painting, painting that bridges the gap between high and low art forms, and the arabesque figure prominently in Matisse’s decorative schemes. Symbolism also fostered the beginnings of the idea of art as an autonomous, self-sufficient system. This is of direct relevance to our understanding of Matisse and his relationship to the cut-out, for the formalist approach insists that while the content of the art work can be common place, banal even, it is the artist’s treatment of a theme or idea that transforms it into ‘art’. The cut-outs represent the culmination of his formalist tendencies, an emphasis on form that both emphasises the uniqueness of each cut-out and at the same time confirms and articulates nature’s essential structures.

Moreover it was during this fin de siècle period that the belief in art as a privileged space, an alternative to the bland life style of the bourgeoisie or as a restorative means that to some extent responded to the longing for transcendence previously provided by religion came to be mainstream. Indeed, inasmuch as faith came to reside in art making, the artist’s response to the world could be construed as religious. All these ideas, some of which figure in Matisse’s art folio Jazz, were to furnish Matisse with an important measure of his artistic output.  Often, it was through commissions for textile, book and theatre designs which depended on his gift for linear expression, rather than in painting with its emphasis on colour, that he found solutions to problems that had been besetting him and from which he needed to escape, as is the case of the Nice impressionist period.

Throughout most of his career Matisse tended to regard his drawings as more successful than his paintings, and realised from early on that in order to achieve his aim he would have to step beyond the parameters of the Western tradition which, from the Renaissance, had viewed colour as a mere supplement to drawing. Moving from drawing to colour presented problems for Matisse, specifically that of colour interaction. Matisse understood that colour only exists in relationship and one of his primary concerns was to maintain relations between colour that elevate rather than demote the totality of their combined forces, and to do this whilst still maintaining an overall sense of harmony. This use of colour rather than form to provide a picture with structure and define its space was one of the lessons he learnt from Cezanne, the artist whose tenaciousness and spirit of independence from both the academy and the avant-garde Matisse most closely emulated. From Cezanne, too, came an emphasis on balance and harmony that was so crucial to Matisse’s vision of art’s ethical as well as its aesthetic function and its greater integration into society. These were aspects of art that he also recognised in the art of the Orient, in the geometric ornamentation of Islamic art where form is content, and in the decorative richness of Byzantine artefacts and the way all the elements within the space of a Byzantine church are subordinated to the general atmosphere of religious worship. Memories from trips to Russia would guide him when creating ‘a space for the spirit’ in his chapel in Vence. In matters of faith, Matisse described himself as ‘religious so to speak’, and when asked whether he believed in God he answered ‘Yes, when I work’ going so far as to say, with reference to the chapel at Vence, that: “I have the feeling that I am not the one who painted it; God is.”  He explained on another occasion that his experience of awe was transposed from God to Nature, to the inherent vitality that characterises life, and to the mystery of the universe within and without.