The Clown

Henri Matisse's The Clown ( Le clown ) turns a circus performer into a bright, unsettled shape. A white figure tilts against a broad black field. Red marks flash across its body, while blue bars, a yellow strip and a wandering black line hold the scene at the edges. The figure seems to have been caught in motion, but there is no ring, audience or detailed costume to explain the act. Matisse made the original from painted and cut paper in June 1943; the design later opened his illustrated book Jazz as plate I. ^{[1] [2]}

What is happening in the picture?

The clown's white body sits to the right of centre, with one upper part thrust sideways and the lower part bent into two tapering forms. Its outline alternates between curves and sudden angles. Because the background is nearly solid black, the white cut paper can appear to hover rather than stand on a floor. Matisse gives us the energy of a performer without pinning down a single circus trick. The title identifies the character; the shape leaves the action open. ^[1]

Small red cuts run across the white figure. They can first look like costume decoration or the sparks of movement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also suggests that these plant-like forms can be read as scars or wounds. That is a productive tension in the image, not proof of an illustrated injury or an exact episode in Matisse's life. The clown is both vivid and exposed: white against black, crossed by sharp red accents. ^[3]

The frame refuses to sit quietly. Along the left, a black, wavering vertical shape presses against a yellow strip. Above and below, blocks of deep blue contain narrow white interruptions, like gaps in a rhythm. A thin yellow band runs under the top blue row. These pieces pull the eye around the edges before returning it to the white figure. The black centre provides a stage-like depth, yet every coloured part stays flat and assertive. Movement is made by the intervals between shapes as much as by the figure itself. ^[1]

Is this a cut-out or a print?

There are two important stages of The Clown . The original maquette in the Centre Pompidou collection is gouache-painted paper, cut and pasted on paper mounted on canvas. It measures 67.2 × 50.7 centimetres, bears Matisse's June 1943 inscription and has inventory number AM 1985-315 (1). The museum received it in a 1985 dation. Its physical edges and pasted parts belong to the making of this particular design. ^[1]

The image in the published Jazz is a 1947 pochoir, or colour stencil print. The National Gallery of Art owns one such plate, catalogued as The Clown , plate I, with a sheet measuring 41.9 × 64.9 centimetres. It is a separate printed object, not the Pompidou collage and not an oil painting. Edmond Vairel translated the designs into stencils using gouache colours close to those of the originals. A reproduction can obscure the material difference, which is why the date and medium matter when identifying an image of The Clown . ^{[1] [4] [3]}

Why does the clown come first in Jazz?

Pompidou's account places The Clown among the first designs Matisse made for the project and traces the early figure to his earlier ballet studies. Together with The Toboggan , which became the final plate, it helped establish a circus idea before the book acquired the broader title Jazz . Its first position therefore opens the volume with a human figure in motion rather than with a formal introduction to every scene that follows. Other plates turn to acrobats, travel, fantasy and lagoons. The change in subject helps explain why the finished title could hold more than a circus alone. ^{[1] [2]}

The route from ballet study to book image was not a single straight commission. Pompidou's catalogue says Matisse had studied figures for Léonide Massine's ballet L'Étrange Farandole . In 1943, after work on a proposed issue of Verve and difficulties reproducing selected paintings, he reconsidered those cut-paper studies. The Clown and The Toboggan were the first two compositions he completed for the album in June. Their later placement at opposite ends of Jazz makes an opening-and-closing pair out of images with a shared theatrical origin. That history gives the clown's tilted posture a context without claiming it illustrates a particular step from the ballet. ^[1]

The book combined twenty coloured plates with pages of Matisse's writing copied in a dark brush hand. The visual pause between image and text was part of its design. The Clown began that reading experience with cut-paper speed translated into printed colour; the original maquette also remains an artwork with its own scale and surface. Matisse initially found the printed result less satisfying than the originals, as Pompidou's catalogue records, though he later acknowledged its colour. Seeing the two stages separately clarifies the achievement of each. ^{[1] [2]}

The long production explains the gap between the maquette's 1943 date and the book's 1947 date. Pompidou says that eighteen designs were already listed in a letter to publisher Tériade by August 1944, while Matisse decided in 1946 to write the accompanying text himself. Colourist Edmond Vairel prepared the stencil colours and Draeger Frères printed the text pages. The printed Clown therefore came from a collaboration of cutting, colour matching, stencil work and book design. None of that changes the fact that the Pompidou collage and a printed sheet are two physical objects with different surfaces. ^[1]