Matisse's Garden

by Samantha Friedman (Author) Cristina Amodeo (Illustrator)

Matisse's Garden
Reading Level: 2nd − 3rd Grade

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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Kirkus

Starred Review
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)

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

School Library Journal

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

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Hornbook

Friedman's spare, clear-eyed prose pairs with clean cut-paper illustrations to introduce readers to the development of Henri Matisse's late-career practice of cut-outs. 

Review quotes

'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."—Publishers Weekly (09/01/2014)
Samantha Friedman

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.

Classification
Non-fiction
ISBN-13
9780870709104
Lexile Measure
940
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
Museum of Modern Art
Publication date
October 07, 2014
Series
-
BISAC categories
JNF006040 - Juvenile Nonfiction | Art | History
JNF001000 - Juvenile Nonfiction | Activity Books
Library of Congress categories
France
Collage
Artists
Appreciation
Matisse, Henri

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