Matisse's Garden

One day, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) cut a small bird out of a piece of white paper. It was a simple shape, but he liked the way it looked and didn’t want to throw it away, so he pinned it to the wall of his room. But the bird looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it, and before he knew it, he had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens filled with brightly coloured plants and animals and shapes of all sizes. Featuring colourful cut-paper illustrations and Matisse’s own cut-outs, Matisse’s Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist’s never-ending curiosity and continuous process of trying new things helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art. Children will see how Matisse used nothing but paper and scissors to create simple shapes like squares, leaves and birds, and experimented with scraps of leftover paper and new colour combinations to create lush gardens on his studio walls.

Samantha Friedman is an assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is a contributing author of many books on art.

Cristina Amodeo is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Milan, Italy.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), one of modern art’s most important figures, was a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker who began creating paper cutouts in the 1940s.