This title brings back to life the most important result of Matisses cut-outs period: Jazz, the legendary suite of twenty colorful prints with calligraphic text. With this, readers can experience Jazz as if they were beholding the 1947 original. For the position as most important artist of the modern era, Henri Matisse (1869 — 1954) was rivaled only by Picasso, who himself once said, All things considered, there is only Matisse. After a truly monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, Matisse was struck down by illness and no longer able to stand upright and use a paintbrush. At this late stage in his life - he was nearly 80 - he developed a technique of drawing shapes on brightly colored paper, which he then cut out; these were called gouaches decoupes (gouache cut-outs) and came to represent a revolution in modern art. Many critics at the time dismissed this work as the folly of a senile old man, but today it is common sense that by using scissors to carve shapes ...