The Fall of Icarus

A white figure seems to drift down a slanting black column in Henri Matisse's The Fall of Icarus ( La Chute d’Icare ). Deep blue lies on either side. Jagged yellow bursts interrupt it, and a red shape strikes across the figure's chest. The title recalls the Greek story of the youth who flew too near the sun and fell when his wings failed. Yet the cut-paper figure has no visible wings, sea or horizon. Matisse lets colour and direction carry the drama in this 1943 work. ^{[1] [2]}

What makes the figure seem to fall?

The body is stretched diagonally, with one arm swept outward and the legs tapering toward the lower edge. Its white shape stands out sharply from the black strip beneath it. That strip tilts through the centre rather than making a stable floor. Blue remains visible on both sides, so the body seems suspended in a passage through space. Nothing shows the exact instant when flight turns into a fall. The figure could appear to float for a moment before its downward pull becomes clear. ^[1]

The yellow bursts sit at different heights around the figure. Their pointed edges contrast with the long, smooth curves of the white limbs. They may first read as suns or stars in a dark sky. The red cut over the torso introduces a sharper, more bodily note: it points down and inward while the limbs open out. These few colours make the movement easy to grasp from a distance, but they also leave the cause and meaning of the fall open to interpretation. ^[1]

The work was made from gouache-painted paper that Matisse cut and arranged with pins. The 2026 Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais exhibition describes surviving pins in this original, now in a private collection. They are a reminder that the image began as movable pieces, not painted outlines on a continuous canvas. The exhibition gives its size as 36 × 26.5 centimetres: a small sheet capable of suggesting a wide, unstable sky. ^[1]

What do the surviving pins tell us?

Pins are unusually consequential here because the Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais identify this as one of the few cut-outs that still retains them. A pinned shape could be shifted while Matisse tested its relation to the other pieces. The white body, black diagonal and yellow bursts therefore record an arrangement made through placement, rather than an image drawn once in a fixed outline. The pins do not tell us the order of every adjustment, and the surviving work should not be treated as an unfinished sketch merely because its fastenings remain visible. They make the physical decisions behind its apparent weightlessness easier to imagine. ^[1]

That material fact sharpens the scene. The falling body seems to move, but every fragment is held in place on a small sheet. Its limbs nearly touch the black passage without merging with it, while the blue intervals on either side keep the figure exposed. Looking closely at the spaces around the paper pieces changes the question from “what happened to Icarus?” to “how can a few separate shapes hold a body in midair?” The instability belongs to the subject and to the way the composition was assembled. ^[1]

Is this the Icarus from Jazz?

Matisse returned to Icarus for his illustrated book Jazz , but its plate VIII uses a different design. In the 1947 print recorded by the National Gallery of Art, the figure is black against a blue field, with a small red circle on its chest and yellow star-like shapes nearby. The page shown here instead has a white body over a long black column and a larger red mark. The 2026 exhibition explicitly distinguishes the two compositions. ^{[1] [3]}

The material objects differ too. MoMA's 2014 checklist lists the privately held Fall of Icarus as a 1943 cut-and-pasted work with pins. In a separate entry it identifies Icarus , the cut-paper maquette for Jazz plate VIII, in the Centre Pompidou collection. That maquette led to the 1947 pochoir, or stencil print. A shared myth and related visual signs do not make the 1943 Fall , the Jazz maquette and the printed plate interchangeable. ^{[2] [3]}

Why can the yellow shapes feel threatening?

The Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais exhibition recounts Louis Aragon's reading of the yellow splashes as bursting shells and the figure as a downed aviator. That interpretation places the work in the darkness of the Second World War, when it was made. The pointed shapes and red chest mark allow that reading, while the mythological title still invites stars, sunlight and the ancient story of a disastrous flight. The image holds those possibilities together; it need not be reduced to a single coded message. ^[1]

Its first intended setting also matters. Pompidou's account describes Matisse making La Chute d’Icare for the frontispiece of an issue of the art journal Verve . The 2026 exhibition links the proposed reproduction to the 1945 issue. Matisse drew on an earlier ballet-curtain study as he developed the cut-paper figure. The composition therefore belongs to the experiments in moving bodies and illustrated pages that surrounded Jazz , while retaining its own image and history. ^{[1] [4]}