Henriette & Matisse

Monsieur Matisse, everyone knows, is a great painter. Mademoiselle Henriette is his model. When she poses and dances for him, 2 brushes constantly fight for line and color...

Henriette is therefore the hero of our little story. The resonance of their first names is amusing. But a true Henriette Darricarrère, during the 1920s, guided the painter’s hand...

Somewhere between inspiration and muse, know-how and invention, reality and representation, between reproduction and stylization, our 4 characters — the artist, the model, the brush for color and the brush for line — dance and draw the body’s curves. A playful-pictorial story of the creative act develops on stage and in movement.

For children understand art better than we think. In their innocent and voracious appetite for information, every discovery is potentially equally important as any other: there is nothing odd or peculiar, only possibilities!

Henri Matisse’s work is distinguished by several “dances” and presents rich opportunities for interacting with children. His quest for life, for the essence of painting, leads him to simplification and, if literal figuration recedes as the years go by, the artist never abandons the contours of the body as a source of inspiration. When he strays from the traditional form of painting, it’s to invent the very famous colored cut-outs. This technique marks a very important stage of his later work; it bears witness to the struggle between line and color, an important characteristic of the great painter’s investigations.

Pick-up your brushes, your scissors, invent gestures... And with dances in water-colored cut-outs, visit theaters, visit museums and dream in color!