"I would like each part of a painting to keep its personal character while forming a total composition.
Each red remains red, each blue remains blue - like jazz, in which each performer playing as a soloist increases his part of his fantasy, of his sensitivity. »It is nevertheless astonishing that the most famous work of Henri Matisse, the one which made it discover to a large public, is entitled Jazz, while it does not include any direct reference to this music. Reading this sentence by the painter in the spotlight at the Center Pompidou, we understand that it is less in the subject than in the manner that we must seek the link with the music he loved so much. Henri Matisse had discovered jazz thanks to his son Pierre, a gallery owner based in New York. A sincere lover of this new music that he would listen to in Harlem clubs, Pierre Matisse, who organized a major retrospective for his father at MoMA in 1931, provided him with jazz records. Also, when he left in 1930 on a trip to Tahiti, the painter made a stopover in New York, where he met artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance movement as well as musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.
Published in 1947 but initiated in 1943, Jazz was imagined by Matisse as "a kind of artistic autobiography", composed of autonomous images and a handwritten text, with obvious visual power, in which he returns to the great stages of his artistic journey. "Shouldn't we take young people who have finished their studies on a long plane trip?" He wasn't young when he made this trip, but he obviously came home deeply impressed. Jazz,it is ultimately like a travel diary produced a posteriori, after having moved away from the trips. What remains of an exotic adventure: the colors, the lights, the sensations… and the music too. Ten years before his death, Matisse innovated: due to failing health, he was forced to give up his traditional tools, the brush and paint, in favor of a new technique: cut gouache. He opposes shapes, colors, structures, he plays with rhythm. Faced with constraint, he invents. He improvises like a jazzman. L'oeil, by Laure Albernhe Video : art explained here "Jazz"