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Matisse's Garden

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Matisse's Garden

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Hardcover
$19.95

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Overview

One day, the French artist Henri Matisse cut a small bird out of a piece of paper. It looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it. Before he knew it, Matisse had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens, filled with brightly colored plants, animals, and shapes of all sizes! Featuring cut-paper illustrations and interactive foldout pages, Matisse’s Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist’s never-ending curiosity helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art.

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ISBN-13:	9780870709104
Publisher:	The Museum of Modern Art
Publication date:	10/07/2014
Pages:	48
Sales rank:	525,317
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 12.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	AD940L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Samantha Friedman is an assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is a contributing author of many books on art.

Cristina Amodeo is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Milan, Italy.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), one of modern art’s most important figures, was a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker who began creating paper cutouts in the 1940s.

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…an ingenious picture book…Friedman's spare text hits its marks perfectly…

The New York Times Book Review - Maria Russo

09/01/2014
Joining a spate of recent picture books about Matisse that includes The Iridescence of Birds, Henri’s Scissors, and Colorful Dreamer, this collaboration between Friedman, an assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Milan-based illustrator Amodeo, focuses on the artist’s exploration of cut-paper collage. Amodeo uses the same medium for her illustrations, which echo the simplified forms and bright colors Matisse played with; she pictures the artist in a brown button-down shirt, his blank face defined by a broad beard and large eyeglasses. Friedman’s crisp writing highlights the importance of trial and error (“He cut leaves of other hues and set them against backgrounds of every shade, experimenting with different harmonies and contrasts”). She also devotes welcome attention to Matisse’s assistants: in one clever scene, three workers use large brushes to paint sheets of paper yellow, violet, and green, their movements echoing those of the figures in Matisse’s La Danse. Eight reproductions of Matisse’s cut-paper work appear throughout, some on gatefolds, and a brief biography closes out this strong study of an artist’s thought processes and growth. Ages 4–8. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2014
Gr 1–3—Seemingly on a whim one day, artist Henri Matisse cut a bird out of white paper, pinned it on his wall, and created a brand-new art form. Eight of his cut-paper works, some appearing as gatefolds, are reproduced in this charming, kid-friendly informational picture book that briefly describes how Matisse began working in his new style and how it and he soared as a result. Amodeo fully captures Matisse's inventive joy with her cut-paper illustrations, which work beautifully with the text and pop from the pages with brilliant, vivid colors, and kinetic energy. In a whimsical spread, the illustrator depicts the man flying to demonstrate how unfettered he felt as his scissors glided effortlessly through paper. Having started with white paper, Matisse eventually asked his assistants to paint paper against which to set his ever-larger cutouts that culminated in a studio "garden." (In a delightful touch, the assistants are shown in a scene reminiscent of the artist's La Danse.) Kids get cut- (or torn-) paper art intuitively and love playing with bright colors when creating their own masterpieces, and they'll appreciate that this book validates their own ideas about the freedom that comes with artistic experimentation. A brief biographical paragraph and material about the artworks close out the book. This title also makes for a great read-aloud before collage projects and in art units on major artists and color theory. Excellent.—Carol Goldman, Queens Library, NY

School Library Journal

★ 2014-09-14
This book ingeniously narrates Matisse's paper-cutout process visually, using the same medium as the artwork created by the painter while bedridden during his final years. Amodeo's elegant cutouts pay homage to the great artist by illustrating the evolution of Matisse's use of this medium, from the creation of simple shapes such as birds and bees, through analysis of color harmony and relationships and exploration of positive and negative space, to pattern and composition. The artwork is so skillfully applied and photographed that the illusion of cut-paper shapes is maintained throughout. The elderly, bespectacled figure of Matisse is portrayed in cutout form as he experiments with shapes, first cutting out a simple bird, then adding shapes reminiscent of seaweed and fish inspired by his travels in Polynesia, then flying like the birds he is creating. Not satisfied with the white shapes, Matisse asks his assistants to paint sheets of paper in a range of shades so he can cut directly into color and experiment with different color combinations. Eight of Matisse's original works are reproduced at intervals throughout the book, carefully chosen to illustrate key aspects of the artist's intention. In its inventive approach to teaching art history, this book should inspire teachers and students alike to experiment with color, shape and form in the same free and expressive mode as the master. (Informational picture book. 5-10)

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