Henri Matisse’s Blue Hair is art history’s “turning lemons to lemonade” story. By the 1940s, Matisse’s declining health made it difficult to continue working in a range of artistic mediums. He gave up conventional painting in 1950. Undeterred by these limitations, he began experimenting with paper cutouts painted with gouache (thick water-based paint).

Far from limiting his creative vision, the cutouts allowed Matisse to take his prior work with abstraction a step further. The cutouts distilled the three primary elements of painting—color, line, and form—into a single entity. In other words, a paper cutout, once cut, contains all three features, eliminating the need to address each element separately.

Matisse was particularly enthusiastic about the unity of form and line; in his words, the cutouts let him “draw in paper.” That said, his lifelong passion for vibrant colors did not dim with age. The gouache paints he used were so bright that his doctor recommended he wear dark glasses!

Matisse intended to publish Blue Hair in the art review Verve as part of a special issue devoted to his cutouts. Unfortunately, he passed away before the issue was completed, and Verve decided instead to publish a tribute to Matisse containing his final works.

Blue Hair represents a personal and artistic triumph for Matisse. In working with cutouts, he overcame physical limitations and continued to create art. Perhaps more importantly, Matisse was not forced to compromise his artistic vision in order to continue creating; the cutouts were as innovative and challenging as any of the works produced during his long and illustrious career.