ART / Cathy Curtis : Witty, Flowing Shapes Make Up Matisse’s ‘Jazz’ Book

“For most people,” wrote the artist Henri Matisse, “success equals prison, and an artist should never be a prisoner . . . of himself, of a style, of a reputation, of success.”

He wrote these words in the mid-1940s; he was in his 70s, convalescing from an operation. Unable to paint, he had devised a way to liberate himself temporarily from the burdens of illness, war, family troubles (his wife was interned by the Nazis) and perhaps even from the weight of his reputation as one of the pillars of Post-Impressionist painting.

Propped up in bed in a hotel in southern France, he cut out fanciful free-form shapes from sheets of vibrantly painted paper--”crystallizations,” he called them, “of circuses, folk tales and voyages.” An assistant arranged these shapes into sprightly compositions according to Matisse’s instructions. Pinned up on the walls, these paper images kept him company as he worked.

Brilliantly reproduced in 20 full-color stencil prints--and interleaved with his assorted pronouncements on art and life--the cutouts were published in 1947 in a painstakingly produced fine press book called “Jazz.” Separate sheets from the book, on loan from the BankAmerica art collection in San Francisco, are on view at Newport Harbor Art Museum through July 2.

Viewers looking for imagery bearing out the title of the book may be baffled. There are no jazz musicians here, no dancing notes, smoky nightclubs or shimmying dancers. The title relates instead to Matisse’s improvisational method of composition, the bold, easy riffs he spun out with the simple materials at his disposal.

The outlines of the witty, flowing shapes in the prints faithfully capture the jaggedness that resulted from the stops and starts of scissors crunching boldly through paper. Some of the designs are created from the cutout pieces; others read as the outlines formed by the cut-away portions.

Certain images come awfully close to cliche. But even a cowboy on a rearing horse or cutout hearts are redeemed by the amusing novelty and effortless grace--no copycat designer chic here--of the cannily layered and scattered scraps of colored paper.

Dominated by references to the circus, the designs also relate to a trip Matisse had taken to Tahiti years earlier (the leaflike imagery in the pages titled “Lagoon”) and to a typically Romantic theme: the struggles of the artist in a cruel, uncomprehending world. Underlying all the apparent gaiety, too, was the specter of the war (the large profiled wolf cutout was viewed at the time as an image of the Gestapo).

In “Circus,” the black silhouette of a female trapeze performer with flying hair is caught in the “searchlight” of a skewed white rectangle cut out of the blue background. A single yellow bar--almost like a typographical device--serves to symbolize the trapeze. An irregular red shape flying upward from the bottom of the sheet reads as a safety net.

In “The Funeral of Pierrot,” naively formed, stiff-legged horses pull a hearse. Through the rectangle of blue paper representing the door of the conveyance, we can see the casket--a white cutout--adorned with a small red abstract flower. The wistful Pierrot figure is a stock character in French pantomime, used memorably by Watteau and Picasso to convey the pathos of the artist’s predicament.

The trickiest part of the “Jazz” project was figuring out how to reproduce the intense, saturated colors of Matisse’s original cut papers (the colors were so bright that he complained they were blinding him).

But the Greek-born publisher of the book, known simply as Teriade, was particularly well-suited to his job, having worked on several other book projects with major artists (including Matisse) as well as a couple of legendary French literary and artistic magazines, Minotaure and Verve, to which Matisse contributed.

When it became obvious that commercial lithographic reproduction didn’t do Matisse’s color justice, Teriade experimented with traditional block prints. The ink quality still was disappointing. Finally he turned to the old-fashioned technique of stencil printing, called pochoir, for which artisans had to cut the stencils by hand and brush the inks on by hand, rather than using a roller or spray.

In a preface to the book, Matisse wrote that the unusually large size of his handwriting was intended to exist in a “decorative relationship” to the color prints. “These pages, therefore,” he wrote, “will serve only to accompany my colors, like asters in the composition of a bouquet of more important flowers.”

Still, the written passages do convey wonderful bits of fact and fancy. It is a pity that the museum neither offers translations of the texts that are on view nor bothers to finish the sentences that begin or end on pages of the book not represented in the show.

In any case, there is always something disconcerting about viewing a fine-press book in the rigid, hands-off manner in which paintings, prints and drawings are displayed. Maybe someday someone will figure out a way people can page freely through these rare volumes--the original “Jazz” edition was a tiny 250 copies--without destroying them in the process.

“Henri Matisse: Jazz” continues through July 2 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for students and senior citizens, and $1 for young people 6 to 17. BankAmerica Gold Card holders are admitted free to the museum throughout the run of the exhibit.

Several allied musical events will be held on Sunday afternoons in May and June. For further information: (714) 759-1122.