Henri Matisse: The Resurrection of the Sword Swallower

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) VI – The Wolf (Le loupe), 1947 16 5/8 x 25 5/8 in. (42.228 x 65.088 cm) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Gift of Margaret and William R. Hearst III, 2024.34.6 © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

By KURT COLE EIDSVIG July 16, 2025

You’ve heard the story. In the 1940s, Henri Matisse became gravely ill. In the turmoil of World War II, he eventually underwent life-saving surgery that left the artist too weak to hold a paintbrush. For many, this might have marked the end of a career. But for Matisse, it sparked a new beginning. He was reportedly overjoyed just to be alive—thrilled, even, to be inhabiting the body of a masterful artist. “I am Matisse!” he said, as if making a discovery. Not creating art wasn’t an option. This man, celebrating a second life, turned to a new medium: paper cutouts. What he called “drawing with scissors.”

The result wasn’t just a reinvention; it was a revolution. Some of the first shots fired in those early decisive battles are currently on radiant display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Matisse’s Jazz Unbound is a stunning exhibition built around the museum’s recent acquisition of Jazz, the artist’s 1947 magnum opus of book-making. Published by visionary Greek publisher Tériade (Stratis Eleftheriadis), Jazz includes 20 vibrant pochoirs—color stencil prints—centered on the themes of circus and theater. It’s widely considered one of the greatest artist books of the 20th century. Seeing the unbound prints in person displayed alongside other Matisse works on paper only confirms the claim: Jazz is a masterpiece of modern art.

Part of the enduring resonance of Jazz lies in the emotional magnitude of Matisse’s color. To describe the palette as “vivid” would be an understatement. Even under the subtle museum lights—dimmed to protect the pigments—the purples, greens, oranges, and reds seem to glow as if lit from within. Standing before these prints, the viewer feels they’re in the presence of stained glass. The connection isn’t just visual, it’s spiritual. No wonder artists like Mark Rothko, deeply influenced by Matisse, marveled at the potential of color to evoke pure emotion. These prints are nothing short of a triumph in color composition, a carnival of drama, joy, and resilience. Like the acrobats in the book, their pigments all but leap right from the walls.

The show is also a timely reminder that awe need not be achieved through physical scale. We live in an era obsessed with immersive experiences—Kusama’s infinities, Richard Serra’s towering ellipses, blockbuster installations that swallow viewers whole. Scale has become shorthand for significance. But Matisse’s Jazz offers a counterpoint: intimacy can be just as powerful. Here, emotional scale trumps physical dimension or audacity. Matisse reminds us that awe can just as easily be found in a quiet room, facing a 16-by-25-inch sheet of cut paper.

One of the surprising ideas in modern art is that distance can create intimacy. Matisse’s turn to scissors was an unlikely tool for making images at the time. But that short trip from brushstroke on canvas to scissors above opened a new kind of closeness for the audience. Only a few short years after Jazz, Jackson Pollock flung paint, turning the process itself into performance. De Kooning drew with his eyes closed. Pop artists screened mass culture. Minimalists and conceptualists kept stepping back until art became an idea that didn’t require the artist’s hand for rendering. This shifting distance of intimacy and space all starts right here with Matisse. His scissors didn't just cut. They also cleared space for the viewer to step in. Each step away from traditional mark-making welcomed the audience as co-creator, inviting them to complete the work with their own life and experience.

There’s something radical in the imagery, too. Though often read as whimsical, even childlike, Jazz includes darker undertones. The circus acts—a sword swallower, a wolf, acrobats—become metaphors. Some critics have drawn parallels to the Nazi occupation, or viewed them as symbolic warnings against fascism’s spectacle and seduction. Today, as the world contends with rising authoritarianism and cultural fracture, these interpretations feel freshly relevant.

Among the most interesting images is The Sword Swallower, a work that functions as a kind of self-portrait. Here, the figure appears overcome by spectacle, consumed by illusion and magic, mystifying the audience. But a deeper read suggests this is Matisse himself, swallowing the “swords” of the very scissor arms he was using to redefine art. In the handwritten text of the book, Matisse writes, “Whoever wants to give himself over to painting must begin by having his tongue cut out.” What more fitting self-portrait than this crane-necked head, a Matisse-ean tear sparkling from the corner of his eye, attempting to insert three piercing shards of steel simultaneously? Set against a field of purple accented with a red strip up top, and framed by twin columns of cerulean blue, the glittering effects of light are rendered in black, as with the reflections on the swords and the eye-corner tear. The layering of colors in such saturated tones gives the carefully framed spectacle all the more drama as the gravity of heavy space draws down the swords into the gut. They also serve to provide an after-effect blur of mixing tones as the viewer’s eye flicks to take in the show, as with one of those rod and cones confusing optical illusions of a green and yellow American flag. Stare too long and your eyes become confused and mesmerized. But move your eyes away, and you take the colors with you. They permeate the other things you see. Just as when taking in performative illusion, we are left wondering at the mystery of perception and the lasting effects of magic.     

Consider too that the life-saving surgery Matisse recently barely survived was for duodenal cancer. The procedure involves removing a part of the stomach. So, as the sword swallowers we may know from sideshows and folklore are impervious to the weapons they’re ingesting, Matisse had nearly died from the complications of the very type of “surgery” he was depicting in this picture. He’s rendering the act of rebirth through incision just as he’s giving fresh life to the legacy of modern art.   

A side note worth savoring: Matisse had a long, curious relationship with food and art. As a young, struggling painter—his coat worn inside out like some wild animal—he wouldn’t eat the delicacies he’d scrounged up the money to buy. He reserved them instead for painting. His hunger became a tool, redirected into vision, color, and form that made audiences' mouths water when they beheld his work. Later, when he had the means, he claimed he couldn’t eat a food once he’d rendered it. He’d already consumed it in the act of painting—devoured it on canvas. In that light, The Sword Swallower feels even more personal. Jazz isn’t just metaphor. It’s a gesture of transformation, even hope: If I can draw the knife, perhaps I won’t need to swallow it any longer. Here is a man transmuting his stitched-up incisions into style, trauma into technique. No more surgical blades, the image seems to say. I’ve had my fill.

At least in terms of eating them. In making art, Matisse is here in the form of the sword swallower snip-snip-snipping shards of painted paper in imagery that combines guzzling inspiration as if drinking from a fire hydrant, a frenetic need to get work on paper, and a surgical precision in making these works. The image asks questions about legacy, production, and transformation. The Sword Swallower becomes a certain stand-in for the artist, daringly slicing through paper to produce dazzling results. As we watch what follows in page after page of dynamic composition and color, the circus Matisse created here is nothing short of a death-defying act. A celebration of art, dexterity, innovation, and life itself.

Matisse’s Jazz Unbound is on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 27, 2025.  WM