Two Masks (The Tomato)

Henri Matisse's Two Masks (The Tomato) is one artwork with a title that asks the eye to try more than one reading. A tilted red shape sits against a green field. Across it, broad white cut forms curl downwards, interrupted by narrow red and violet openings. Small white sprigs mark the green around the edges. Faces seem to emerge from the central shapes, while the red centre and the surrounding green keep the tomato in play. The composition never settles into a straightforward picture of either subject. ^{[1] [2]}

Where are the two masks?

The largest white forms take up most of the middle. They curve out from a high central band and fall in separate lobes, as if two broad masks overlap. Dark violet slots and red streaks cut through the white. These openings can be read as facial features, but they do not form two neat portraits with matched eyes, noses and mouths. A pair of violet diamond shapes above them strengthens the sense of doubling. Matisse lets repetition suggest a pair while the contours keep changing as they cross the red ground. ^[2]

The red beneath the white is a skewed, almost rectangular mass, wider at the lower edge than at the top. It supplies a bold colour centre rather than the round outline of an ordinary tomato. The title's parenthesis invites a fruit reading, and the green surrounding it can make the red feel newly vivid. Yet the red also works as a stage for the white masks. The same piece of colour can serve the two parts of the title without becoming a literal illustration of either. ^{[1] [2]}

Look outward and the small white forms change the scale of the scene. There are six near the edges, each like a leaf or flower cut into radiating fingers. They are spaced against the green rather than crowded into the centre. Their repeated white echoes the central masks, while their size and placement make the red and violet cluster seem dense. The eye moves between the broad curves in the middle and these little bursts at the margin. Nothing needs a drawn horizon or conventional depth: overlapping pieces and colour contrasts establish the order. ^[2]

What did Matisse make it from?

MoMA's 2014 exhibition checklist dates the work to 1947 and records gouache on paper, cut and pasted . It measures 47.7 × 51.8 centimetres, only slightly wider than it is tall. These facts matter to the visual effect. The red, white and violet forms are placed pieces of painted paper, so their edges do the work that a line might do in a drawing. White can act as a shape rather than simply the space left between coloured ones. ^[1]

MoMA describes Matisse's cut-out practice at his Vence studio in the later 1940s: coloured paper forms could be pinned, moved and recombined before works were settled and mounted. That account helps explain the flexibility of the medium, though it does not document the exact sequence of decisions for Two Masks (The Tomato) . The finished arrangement itself offers the clearest evidence here: a red field set on green, white forms crossing that red, and smaller motifs distributed around the edges. ^{[3] [2]}

How does it relate to Matisse's other masks?

MoMA's catalogue lists The Eskimo (L'Esquimau) as another 1947 cut-out. Its small white oval face is held in a rectangular frame within a long orange field; here the white mask-like forms spread across the centre of a nearly square green field. Both give a face through few paper shapes, but the width, framing and repeated motifs change how each face is encountered. They are separate works, not two names for the same image. ^{[1] [2]}

The 2014 checklist credited Two Masks (The Tomato) to Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Marron, New York. That identifies its lender for the exhibition; it does not establish where the work is held today. MoMA presents it as an individual cut-out, rather than as a Jazz plate or a pair of separately titled prints. The cut-outs guide gives the wider setting for Matisse's work with painted paper. ^[1]

Why are the spaces between the cuts important?

The white centre does not sit on the red like a simple emblem. Narrow red openings remain between its lobes, allowing the background to become part of the apparent faces. Violet pieces deepen some of those gaps. A change in where the viewer places an imagined eye or mouth can make a different mask appear. The picture's ambiguity comes from these precise relations among cut edges, rather than from an indistinct or unfinished drawing. MoMA's illustration makes it possible to follow the central white form as one connected silhouette and then to see it split into more than one face. ^[2]

Around the centre, the green field has its own role. The six small white sprigs occupy separate patches of it, so the green is neither blank margin nor a naturalistic garden. Their intervals hold the busy middle in place and make its white curves seem larger by comparison. In Matisse's Vence practice, as MoMA describes it, cut paper could be moved on a wall before a composition was fixed. That general method helps explain why the distance between shapes is a designed relationship. It does not let us reconstruct a lost first arrangement for this particular work. ^{[2] [3]}