Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Henri Matisse’s “The Codomas” (1947) is a jubilant explosion of color and motion from the artist’s late cut-paper period. Dense with slashes of ultramarine, a lawn of yellow scattered with black squares, emerald blocks, lilac biomorphs, and an orange proscenium glow, the composition feels like a circus seen in one breath. The plate belongs to the Jazz portfolio, where Matisse reinvented picture-making by “drawing with scissors,” cutting painted papers and composing them as vividly as a band sets a rhythm. “The Codomas” converts a trapeze act into pure elements—net, rigging, spotlight, flight—so that the sensation of risk and aerial grace arrives before any literal depiction.
The Late Method: Drawing With Scissors
In the mid-1940s Matisse turned away from the easel to an approach that fused color and contour in a single act. He brushed sheets of paper with matte gouache, then cut directly into the color and pinned the pieces to his studio walls, shifting and refining until the shapes locked. The result is neither collage as ornament nor painting translated into paper, but a new grammar in which the edge of a cut is both line and form. Jazz reproduced these studio maquettes as pochoir plates, a stencil process that preserved the opacity of gouache and the crispness of the scissors’ path. “The Codomas” shows the method at full stride: every element is a clear note, and together they make a chord you feel physically.
Why “The Codomas”
The title points to a troupe of circus acrobats famed for their high-wire and trapeze acts. Matisse had a lifelong fascination with theater, circus, and dance, subjects that allowed him to choreograph line in open space. Rather than illustrate performers mid-flip, he abstracts the entire apparatus and atmosphere—flying bodies, safety net, rigging, lights, backdrop—into a dynamic orchestration of rectangles, diagonals, and biomorphic riffs. The image reads as both memory and design: a night at the big top distilled into essentials.
First Reading of the Composition
Across a warm orange field a pale rectangular “stage” opens like a tent canopy. Within it, a green block sits high and deep, while a huge yellow wedge sweeps across the lower half, scattered with tilting black squares that immediately suggest a net or a dazzled audience seen from above. Two thick blue diagonals and a white angular bracket cut across the center like pieces of rigid rigging. Yellow serpentine bands wriggle along the green—lithe arcs that read as acrobats tracing air. All around, coral-like shapes in blue and mauve play the role of confetti, decorative foliage, or bursts of applause, keeping the rhythm lively and unbroken from edge to edge.
Color as Circus Weather
The palette is exuberant and specific. Orange generates the heat and hum of the tent. Emerald deepens the “backstage” space so events feel set within an arena rather than on a flat page. Yellow is spotlight and electricity, the streak of attention that follows bodies in midair. Ultramarine supplies crisp structure; it reads as rope, ladder, and the cool breath that cuts through heat. Black, laid down as flat diamonds, anchors the whirl and gives the eye a pulse to count. Every color carries a job—temperature, depth, or beat—so the page never slips into mere decoration.
The Net of Black Squares
The yellow field peppered with black squares is the composition’s most legible emblem. The repeating forms tilt on different axes, like a grid shaken into life, and they suggest the safety net stretched taut beneath the act. Matisse keeps the “mesh” open by using squares rather than lines; you feel resilience and pattern without literal weaving. The squares also hover between things: depending on your distance, they can be knots in the net, the audience’s heads, or counters in a game whose rules are risk and rescue. Their insistence turns attention downward even as everything else flies up, reminding us that the circus is a conversation between gravity and defiance.
Diagonals, Frames, and the Rigging of Motion
Two emphatic blue diagonals and one white angular bracket slice across the center. They behave like rigging and trapeze bars but also as compositional rulers setting the page’s tilt. Nothing in “The Codomas” is level; diagonals give the feeling that the act is underway, that bodies and equipment are in kinetic relation. The thick colored “frames” do what perspective lines would do in a conventional picture: they deliver vectors that the eye can ride, translating weightless acrobatics into a legible architecture of movement.
Yellow Serpents and the Idea of Flight
Winding along the green, two ribbon-like yellow shapes perform the acrobats themselves. They are deliberately unfigurative; their serpentine curves allow them to double as trails through air, like the path a hand would trace to show how someone has swung and turned. Because the ribbons touch the structural blues and hover over the green block, they make the scene volumetric without any modeling. The performers are pure movement, and their bodies are the lines they draw.
Biomorphs at the Margins
The mauve and ultramarine coral shapes scattered at the edges are classic Matisse motifs from the cut-out period. Here they function as decorative chorus and as rhythmic counterpoint to the right angles. Their rounded branches soften the engineering of the rigging and net; their placement pushes the composition outward so that the event feels larger than the central rectangle admits. These biomorphs are also a cue to the viewer that the circus is a living ecosystem—breath, noise, bodies, foliage of motion.
Figure–Ground Play and Visual Reversals
Matisse builds the plate on constant reversal. Green is background until the yellow ribbons make it foreground; black squares read as solid until the yellow pours around them like light through a sieve. The blue frames can be bars or windows. Even the orange border flips roles: sometimes it is the tent’s skin, sometimes the echoing light of lamps. This volatility of figure and ground replicates the mental experience of watching a high-wire act, where focus keeps leaping—from body to bar, from net to crowd, from structure to stunt—without ever settling.
Time, Rhythm, and the Music of Jazz
The Jazz portfolio is titled for music because Matisse composed these pages like scores. In “The Codomas,” the rhythm is unmistakable: squares march and swing; diagonals set tempo; serpentine motifs riff and repeat. There is even a call-and-response quality between left and right halves of the page, as if two performers were echoing each other’s flights. The eye experiences syncopation through spacing—tight clusters of black, long rests of green, sudden shocks of blue—so that looking becomes a kind of counting, and counting becomes delight.
Space Built From Paper
There is no traditional perspective in this picture, yet the illusion of space is strong. Overlaps and cuts alone do the work. The blue diagonals override the yellow wedge; the yellow ribbons lie above green; the black squares sit on yellow and drop away where the orange border takes over. Matisse sometimes assembled large shapes from multiple painted sheets, and the faint seams that result keep the space honest: this is a world literally constructed, its depth a function of decisions rather than of tricks.
Materiality and the Edge of the Cut
Because cut paper is both color and contour, edges become the plate’s handwriting. You can feel the scissors accelerate around a curve and hesitate at a corner. Those hand-wrought lines prevent the composition from hardening into hard-edge geometry and keep the circus human. Even the thick blue “bars” reveal tiny pressure changes, like finger vibrato on a string. The material candor—flat color, visible joins, alive edges—gives the plate its freshness decades later.
Dialogue With Other Circus Plates
Within Jazz, “The Codomas” converses with other images of acrobats, clowns, swimmers, and masks. In some plates Matisse isolates a single emblem; here he stages an entire world. The difference lies in density: where “Icarus” or “The Heart” rely on one red punctum against a field, “The Codomas” floods the page with events. It is the suite’s most architectural circus, the one that teaches how an environment of risk is built from pieces that must hold together in real time.
Energy Without Figures
One of the plate’s quiet achievements is its refusal of anatomy. No limbs, faces, or costumes appear, yet the image communicates the erotic charge of flight—the twinned sensations of danger and grace—more immediately than many literal scenes. Matisse trusted shape itself to carry drama. The yellow ribbons become bodies because their path is persuasive; the black squares become the social mass because their multiplication is convincing. Eliminating human silhouettes gives the viewer’s body room to enter imaginatively.
Order and Improvisation
Like a performance, the composition balances tight planning with spontaneity. The grid of black squares asserts order, the stable platform on which a dangerous act can happen. The diagonals set rules of angle and reach. Against that, the serpentine yellows improvise; their curves look felt rather than measured. The biomorphs contribute a looser rhythm, and the orange field bathes everything in a unified light. The harmony between structure and play is the point: circus art and Matisse’s art both thrive in that fault line.
Reading at Multiple Distances
From across a room the plate reads as a radiant poster: yellow net, green stage, blue rigging, orange tent. Move closer and edges begin to hum; the slight tilts and misalignments become expressive; the hand in the cut turns legible. The image is engineered to succeed at both scales, a habit Matisse honed in decades of poster and book design. This dual competence is why Jazz plates continue to live comfortably on walls, in books, and on screens.
What the Plate Teaches
“The Codomas” is a primer in visual design. Color must have jobs. Edges must speak. Repetition needs variation to become rhythm. Diagonals energize rectangles. Figure–ground can be a game rather than a rule. And above all, emotion can be engineered without illustration: exhilaration, suspense, and release arrive from intervals, densities, and counterweights. These lessons make the plate feel startlingly contemporary; its grammar is as useful to a stage designer or motion-graphics artist today as it was to Matisse at his table.
Conclusion
“The Codomas” is a cut-paper epic about daring. With nothing but fields of gouache and the surety of his scissors, Matisse builds a circus in which bodies fly as yellow phrases, rigging slices the air in blue, a net of black squares steadies the heart, and an orange light warms the tent of the world. It is an image that moves before it explains, that trusts color to be both structure and spirit. In the Jazz portfolio, it stands as one of the most generous statements of what late Matisse discovered: that when you reduce an experience to its living edges, the joy of seeing takes flight.