Matisse’s Garden

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.

One day, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) cut a small bird out of a piece of white paper. It was a simple shape, but he liked the way it looked and didn't want to throw it away, so he pinned it to the wall of his room. But the bird looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it, and before he knew it, he had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens filled with brightly coloured plants and animals and shapes of all sizes. Featuring colourful cut-paper illustrations and Matisse's own cut-outs, Matisse's Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist's never-ending curiosity and continuous process of trying new things helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art. Children will see how Matisse used nothing but paper and scissors to create simple shapes like squares, leaves and birds, and experimented with scraps of leftover paper and new colour combinations to create lush gardens on his studio walls.

A children's book published to accompany what is certain to be a blockbuster exhibition, Matisse: The Cut-Outs, showing at Tate Modern from 17 April to 7 September 2014 and thereafter at The Museum of Modern Art, New York