Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Henri Matisse’s “The Fall of Icarus” distills a Greek myth into a handful of charged silhouettes: a white figure with outstretched arms and scissored legs floats—or plummets—down the center of a black vertical band. Around that band, ultramarine panels crackle with yellow starbursts. A single red form, like a jagged flare, burns in the figure’s chest. Made in 1943 as one of the key plates that would later anchor his book Jazz, the image shows Matisse at the moment he reinvented his practice through paper cut-outs. With only five shapes and four colors, he turns an ancient narrative into something modern, urgent, and unforgettable.
A Myth Reimagined for Modern Eyes
Icarus, the boy who flew on waxen wings and fell when he neared the sun, is usually pictured with feathers, sky, and a watery death below. Matisse strips the story to essentials and removes time, place, and all literal props. There are no wings, no sea, no father, no sun. What remains is the quintessential moment of risk and consequence: a human body pitched against the night. By refusing anecdote, Matisse makes the myth universal—about aspiration and gravity, hubris and fragility, yes, but also about the mystery of being a body in space. The red shape at the chest becomes the “sun” inside the figure, an inner conflagration rather than an external cause.
Composition as Axis and Stage
The picture is built around a strong central axis: a black column that tilts slightly, like a narrow stage cutting across the blue. That column reads simultaneously as a shaft of falling darkness, a path, and a spotlight; within it the white body is set off with theatrical clarity. The figure is vertical but canted just enough to imply movement. The diagonal lean lets the limbs splay into dynamic curves—an arabesque Matisse had chased for decades—so that even in stillness the form feels animated. The surrounding blue fields are not passive background; they act as the air, the world, a vastness against which the drama unfolds.
The Language of Color
Color here is not descriptive; it is structural and emotional. Ultramarine supplies infinite depth, a night that is saturated rather than empty. Black provides gravity and contrast, the narrow place where falling becomes visible. White is the “light” of the body—innocence, exposure, clarity. Yellow starbursts explode like percussion across the blue, marking beats in the visual rhythm. The red at the chest is the painting’s engine: too small to be a sun, too pointed to be a simple heart, it reads as wound, spark, alarm, and pulse all at once. Because the palette is so spare—blue, black, white, yellow, red—every hue carries a precise job, and the harmony reads instantly across a room.
Movement Without Motion Lines
Matisse never resorts to literal motion devices. Instead, he builds movement through proportion and interval. The figure’s limbs are unequal—one arm thrust forward, the other close to the torso; one leg curved outward, the other sliding back into the column—so the eye rides from head to foot in a long, elastic “S.” The slight rotation of the black band tilts the world under the figure. The starbursts are staggered rather than evenly spaced, so they quicken and slow the eye as it crosses the blue. Everything is arranged to create the feeling of descent without any descriptive tricks.
Positive and Negative Space
Cut-out art teaches that the space around and within a form is as articulate as the form itself. In “The Fall of Icarus,” negative space is eloquent. The blue fields at left and right press on the black column, making it feel narrow and precipitous. Within the white body, uncolored paper between limbs opens like light coming through. Even the tiny triangles where limb meets column are thoughtfully shaped; they act like hinges and pockets of air, helping the figure read as supple rather than blocky. The picture is a lesson in how absence can register as presence.
Drawing With Scissors
The plate is a gouache cut-out translated into print. Matisse first painted sheets of paper with opaque color and then cut directly into those fields. He described the process as “drawing with scissors”—a way to achieve a continuous, confident edge that carries the energy of a brushstroke with the authority of silhouette. You can see the scissor’s rhythm in the figure’s curves: the shoulder’s long sweep, the waist’s quick inward pinch, the legs’ twin leaf-like tips. The stars’ ragged points are not symmetrical; they retain the flicker of the hand. Because the edges are so alive, the flat colors feel anything but mechanical.
The War-Year Context
The date matters. Made in 1943, the image emerged amid the Second World War. While it would later be published in Jazz in 1947, the original design belongs to a season of fear, blackout nights, searchlights, and air raids. It is difficult not to read the yellow bursts as flak or explosions, the black column as a shaft through the searchlit sky, and the red chest as mortal vulnerability. Yet the picture is not despairing. The figure keeps its dignity, neither flailing nor contorted. The body’s whiteness shines against the black; the composition remains balanced. Matisse transforms an anxious era into an image of poised intensity.
Figure or Sign?
Is this a person or a symbol of a person? Matisse refuses detail—no fingers, no face, no anatomical modeling. Yet the body is unmistakably human because the proportions are right and the stance is credible. This ambiguity between figure and sign is one key to the plate’s staying power. It allows the viewer to project self into the form and to read it as archetype. The red shape, too, flickers between metaphor and fact: a heart, a wound, a piece of inner fire. The plate shows how a few exact shapes can carry more emotion than a heap of description.
Stars as Bursts of Time
The stars are not twinkling pinwheels; they’re jagged, asymmetrical detonations. Some have longer tines, some shorter; one overlaps the black band and seems to strike the figure’s outstretched arm. Their unevenness gives the picture time. Each star feels like an event rather than a generic decoration—moments in the figure’s passage. They are the visual equivalent of drum hits at irregular intervals, amplifying the “jazz” in the composition without showing a single instrument.
The Red Shape: Wound, Heart, or Flame?
The small red form at the center might be the most analyzed square inch in Matisse’s late work. It aims down like an arrowhead; it flares like a flame; it sits where the heart would be. Matisse refuses to resolve the ambiguity. That openness lets the viewer register multiple truths at once: the risk of flight, the rush of desire, the pain of falling, the stubborn glow of life. In a picture nearly void of internal detail, this one accent carries the emotional weather of the whole.
Relation to Jazz and the Spirit of Improvisation
When “The Fall of Icarus” was reproduced as a pochoir plate in Matisse’s Jazz, it sat among acrobats, knife-throwers, circus acts, and leafy compositions. The portfolio was less about music than about improvisation and rhythm—how images can be built from repeated moves and sudden accents. “Icarus” is arguably the clearest statement of that idea. The figure is a riff on the human silhouette; the stars are percussive syncopations; the red accent is the soloist’s cry. The cut-out method itself, with its capacity for rearrangement and instant revision, behaves like improvisation in color.
From Painting to Stained Glass
Matisse’s late work often invites comparison to stained glass. Flat colors pressed against black bands, charged silhouettes, and light conceived as pure hue—all these qualities appear in “Icarus” and culminate in the chapel at Vence a few years later. The black column functions almost like a lead came in stained glass, separating one field from another while intensifying their meeting. The idea that color could be architecture—not merely surface—is present here in embryo.
Space, Scale, and the Viewer’s Body
The plate’s scale is intimate, yet it claims wall space like a poster. The figure is not life-size; instead, it is scaled to a gesture. When you stand before it, your own arms and legs feel the pull of its pose. The long curves ask the eye to travel in single, sweeping movements rather than in nibbling detail. The bodily recognition is immediate, which may be why the image feels both abstract and personal at once.
Why the Image Still Feels New
Decades later, “The Fall of Icarus” reads as contemporary design: flat, bold, instantly legible. But its freshness is not a matter of fashion. It comes from disciplined clarity. Everything extraneous has been removed; what remains is harmonic and exact. The picture can be read in a second and contemplated for a lifetime, a rare combination. It has the directness of a sign and the depth of a poem.
Reading the Plate Three Ways
One useful way to live with the image is to approach it in stages. From across the room, read it as a single chord—white on black with red and yellow flares in a blue night. At mid-distance, attend to the intervals—the spacing of stars, the tilt of the column, the relationship between head and feet. Up close, study the edges: the quick notches in the stars, the smoothness of the shoulder’s arc, the point where a white leg pierces the black and reemerges. Each distance reveals another layer of Matisse’s decisions.
Legacy and Influence
Few twentieth-century images have entered popular consciousness so widely. “Icarus” has been borrowed by designers, educators, and activists because it compresses complex feelings into a compact symbol. It also taught painters and illustrators that silhouettes could carry high emotion, that color could do narrative work, and that reduction, when carried out with authority, is not simplification but concentration. The plate stands as a benchmark for how much can be said with how little.
Conclusion
Matisse’s “The Fall of Icarus” is a model of modern myth-making. With cut paper and a handful of colors, he offers a body pitched between aspiration and gravity, pierced by inner fire, accompanied by a scatter of starbursts that might be cosmic lights or mortal dangers. The composition’s balance, the color’s logic, and the edge’s vitality combine to deliver an image that is immediate, enigmatic, and inexhaustible. It is not only Icarus who falls; it is also the viewer who drops into the space of color and line and finds, in the plunge, a new clarity about what pictures can do.