Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Henri Matisse’s “The Cowboy” (1947) is a study in velocity, showmanship, and silhouette. Made for the Jazz portfolio, it converts the Western archetype into an abstract drama of cut paper: two black figures—one reading as a mounted or rearing animal on the left, the other a cowboy on the right—are tethered by a taut black line that behaves like a lariat. Behind them, four vertical bands of color—ultramarine, yellow, green, and parchment—stage the action with poster-like clarity. Everything is reduced to decisive edges and large, breathing fields of color, so that the subject arrives in the first second of looking and then keeps opening under longer attention.
A Late Method Suited to Action
By the mid-1940s Matisse had shifted from oil painting to the invention he called “drawing with scissors.” He painted sheets of paper with matte gouache, cut directly into the color, and pinned the pieces to the wall until the composition clicked. In the pochoir plates of Jazz, that method becomes a complete language. Because line and color are one—literally the edge of the cut—the medium suits subjects that thrive on silhouette and timing. Roping, rearing, and show-pony bravado are perfect candidates. “The Cowboy” demonstrates how a handful of shapes can carry the whole theater of a lariat snap.
First Read: What the Page Shows
The left figure bulks like a bronc, its mass swelling and tapering as if the animal were rearing or twisting away. A thin extension at the top suggests a neck and thrown head; the lower curve plants weight. The right figure reads as a human body torqued in action: compact head, chest thrust, hip turned, a free arm bending behind the back. Between them runs a single black band, the lariat, stretched from the cowboy’s hand to a knot near the animal’s shoulder. The background is a sequence of verticals—blue at each far edge like curtains, yellow and cream flanking a central green bar—so the arena feels both open and structured, like a circus ring glimpsed through its striped tent.
Color as Stage and Signal
Matisse assigns jobs to colors and lets them perform without distraction. Blue sits at the margins as cool atmosphere. Yellow is a hot splash of daylight or dust, the glow of an open arena. Green centers the page and reads as turf or a temporary stage panel—a middle temperature that steadies the flanking hues. Parchment off-white on the right quiets the composition and allows the black cowboy shape to read with maximum strength. Because the figures are featureless black, color never competes with the protagonists; it frames them like strong footlights.
Silhouette, Lariat, and the Grammar of Motion
The cut-out encourages Matisse to think in blocks. The black silhouettes are not modeled; their edges do the acting. On the right, the cowboy’s body bends into a compound curve that implies twist and pull. On the left, the animal’s contour swells into a belly-like arc and tightens into a hindleg wedge so that we sense weight and recoil. The lariat, slightly irregular, is the sentence connecting the two nouns. It is not a looped circle or a descriptive coil; it is the single line of cause and consequence, visually sealing who acts upon whom. The entire story—tension and resistance—lives in that line.
Figure–Ground Play That Keeps Reading Alive
Viewed from a distance, the black shapes behave as silhouettes against a striped arena. Move closer, and the brain begins to flip them: the yellow and cream bands become light falling across a ring; the green becomes a vertical barrier receding in space. The black “lasso” flips from a line drawn on the page to a cord stretched in air. This reversibility keeps the image active in perception. Nothing is fixed as a literal object; everything is a relation calibrated by the eye.
Western Archetype Without Anecdote
Matisse’s cowboy is no portrait. There are no boots, no hat brim, no spurs, no saddle horn. Yet the type is unmistakable because the pose and the tool are essentialized. The cowboy’s weight is in the hips; the arm extends in a practiced arc; the rope binds action to animal. By refusing anecdote, Matisse returns the figure to myth: a human staging strength against motion in an arena bordered by elements—sky, ground, light—that feel eternal rather than specific.
The Vertical Banding and Its Theatrical Work
The background stripes are not mere decoration. They structure the event like stage flats. The central green is narrow and upright, a pillar that bodies bounce against. Yellow on the left functions as spotlight and heat, roaring behind the rearing mass. The pale field on the right allows the cowboy shape to breathe and introduces a calmer temperature, as if he were stepping from shade into glare. The blue edges seal the page, acting as cool wings that frame the scene, a device Matisse uses throughout Jazz to establish architecture without perspective.
Rhythm, Syncopation, and a Page That Swings
Jazz is the title of the portfolio for a reason. “The Cowboy” behaves like a score. The broad beats are the four background bars. On top of that grid, the two black figures land like syncopated accents—heavier on the left, more agile on the right. The lariat is the slur connecting notes across a measure. The eye keeps time as it bounces from head to hand, from belly to hip, from rope to rope. The sheet feels musical not because it depicts music but because spacing, recurrence, and counterpoint do the compositional work.
The Cut Edge as Character
Because everything depends on outline, the exact path of the scissors matters. The cowboy’s forearm thickens and narrows with tiny pressure changes; the animal’s neck angles by a hair so that it reads as thrown back rather than leaning forward. These almost invisible adjustments are the difference between stiffness and life. The edge is Matisse’s handwriting. Even in black, which can deaden if overused, the line stays supple because it is literally a paper edge, not a painted fill contained by a drawn contour.
Tension, Distance, and the Space Between
What separates the two figures is as important as what defines them. The open channel of yellow around the lariat heightens the sense of pull; there is nothing to clutter the field, so the rope’s bareness feels exposed and dangerous. The right silhouette leans into the cream, which gives a sense of air; the left silhouette is swallowed by yellow, which reads as heat. That temperature difference sets up an emotional geography: peril on one side, control on the other, with the green divider as a stiffer, cooler partition between. The cowboy’s stance appears more collected not because of internal detail but because of the space the figure occupies.
Why the Cowboy in a European Suite
Matisse’s selection of a cowboy for Jazz may seem unexpected, yet the subject fits his lifelong interest in performers, athletes, and archetypes. The cowboy, like the acrobat or matador, is a public body performing ritualized danger in a defined arena. The myth had crossed the Atlantic through cinema and popular imagery long before 1947; Matisse treats it as a universal gesture rather than a geographic anecdote. In doing so, he folds the American West into the same pantheon as clowns, trapeze artists, and sword swallowers.
A Page Built to Work at Two Distances
From across a room, the picture reads instantly: a roper and a rearing mass connected by a taut line. Up close, craft asserts itself. The gouache fields are matte and dense. The rope’s slight wobble becomes expressive. The background bands reveal brush traces that keep the color alive. The silhouette’s edges show tiny bevels where a cut paused and resumed. This ability to function both as poster and as handmade object is one of the late cut-outs’ quiet miracles, and “The Cowboy” is engineered for that dual success.
The Ethics of Clarity
Matisse wrote in the Jazz texts that an artist should bring energy, sincerity, and modesty to their work and clear away clichés while working. “The Cowboy” demonstrates that ethic. It uses the most economical means to deliver a complex sensation—danger controlled by practice—and it does so without the props of realism. The picture is generous to the viewer: everything needed to grasp the subject is present, nothing superfluous remains. Clarity here is not simplification for its own sake; it is respect for attention.
Relations to Other Plates
Placed alongside “Icarus,” “The Codomas,” or “The Swimmer in the Tank,” this plate creates a family of feats. Where “Icarus” suspends a lone figure in cosmic blue, “The Cowboy” constructs a duet of forces on a striped ground. Where “The Codomas” scatters a net of black squares across yellow, “The Cowboy” holds its background to four clean bars, letting the rope carry rhythm. Where “The Swimmer in the Tank” uses panes to make water plausible, this plate uses color temperature to make dust and sun believable. Across the suite, shared devices—edge, emblem, accent—are recombined to explore different registers of risk.
The Lariat as Drawing
Consider the rope as a line on a blank page. It is dark, relatively thin, and travels from left to right with only one decisive bend. That choice matters. Had Matisse looped a big circle, the lasso would have become spectacle instead of relation. Had he straightened the line, the page would have lost elasticity. The chosen path is a model of economy: a good drawing of a single, continuous action that holds two masses in play. It is as if Matisse insisted that the essence of the cowboy is this one purposeful stroke.
The Bodies as Instruments
The silhouettes read like tools tuned by use. The cowboy’s torso is compact and efficient, anchored at the hip the way a roper’s body must be to receive shock. The left figure has the spring of a loaded shape; its mass gathers potential energy. Because there are no faces, anatomy shifts toward function. The bodies become instruments of a practiced exchange, and the viewer supplies specifics from memory or myth.
Ambiguity That Enlivens
Matisse leaves room for alternate readings. The left shape may be a horse, a bull, or simply the “problem” the cowboy must subdue. The right figure could be mounted or on foot; the lariat’s origin allows both accounts. The stripes can be light bands, tent walls, or abstract bars. This ambiguity is not coyness. It keeps the page from closing down into a single illustration and lets it work as an emblem adaptable to different imaginations.
Emotional Temperature Without Faces
Even stripped of expression, the page has feeling. Yellow heats the left side, making anxiety plausible. Cream cools the right, calming control. The blue borders stabilize the whole. The green bar—cool, upright—reads as the spine of the event. Such affective engineering is the cut-outs’ particular power. They persuade the nervous system directly through relationships of hue and proportion, bypassing the descriptive path.
Why the Plate Endures
“The Cowboy” endures because it solves a complex design problem with grace. It asks how to show action between two agents using only flat color and edge, and it answers with a structural clarity that is immediately graspable and endlessly revisitable. Designers borrow its lessons on contrast and rhythm; painters study its silhouettes; choreographers see poses in its edges; educators use it to teach figure–ground and visual hierarchy. The plate feels contemporary because it runs on principles—weight, interval, vector—that remain useful beyond any style.
Conclusion
Matisse’s “The Cowboy” is a compact epic of relation. Two black bodies, one human and one bestial or problem-shaped, inhabit a striped arena of blue, yellow, green, and cream. A single black line—the lariat—binds them in a sentence of cause and consequence. With scissors and painted paper, Matisse turns Western myth into a clear, modern emblem of practiced risk. The page reads at once and lingers, not through anecdote but through exact placement: silhouettes that breathe, colors that carry temperature, a rope that is also a drawn thought. It is the late cut-out method at full confidence, and it still snaps like a thrown loop.