Matisse Inspired Music Collages

Matisse Musical Collages

During this project 2^nd graders learned about the French artist Henri Matisse. They learned that Matisse created a new type of art that he called "Drawing with Scissors”, which was creating art using scissors and collage.  Matisse would paint paper, cut out shapes, and glue his art to a giant piece of paper. Some of Matisse's works were inspired by Jazz music, musical instruments, rhythms and beats. Students viewed several of Matisse’s works and noticed how he used repeated shapes to represent the beats of music and unique shapes that possibly could represent sounds of various instruments! We discussed the use of shape and learned that there are two groups of shapes in the world. One group that has names: Geometric and the other shapes that do not have names: Organic. Students cut their own geometric and organic shapes to create patterns and created musical instruments similar to Henri Matisse's colorful collages.