La Négresse 1952

Henri Matisse made La Négresse, an outsize paper cut-out, sometime in his late period. It’s so large that it's almost a mural. You can really feel the artist figuring things out as he goes. The first thing that hits you is the playful composition of colourful botanicals surrounding the abstracted silhouette. The texture is smooth, the colours are opaque, there is very little sense of depth. But the matte surface of the paper contrasts subtly with the pale ground. I love that jagged parallelogram that forms the figure’s foot: so bold! Together, the forms dance and vibrate. It makes me think of the way he worked in his earlier paintings, building them up and then scraping them back, editing and refining to arrive at some kind of essence. It seems to me that Matisse's cut-outs are like one stage further along in that process of distillation. There's a wonderful exchange between Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly in these cut-outs, though Kelly's hard-edge panels feel more self-contained. Ultimately, these works are about pure, unadulterated joy in form and colour.