Henri Matisse, Printed by Edmond Vairel, Published by Tériade for Éditions Verve. “Horse, Rider, and Clown” from “Jazz,” 1947. Simeon B. Williams Fund. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The theft of a work of art, when it happens on a Sunday, always seems to acquire a cinematic veneer that oddly approaches the absurd. Criminals take advantage of the city’s torpor, the stillness of empty streets, the folded newspaper under the arm of someone returning from the street market, to remove something that will never again be the same once it disappears. That was the case at the Mário de Andrade Library in Sã0 Paulo, Brazil, where “Jazz,” by Henri Matisse (along with prints by Portinari), was stolen once again in December 2025—because the ghosts of the past never rest when a city’s memory remains exposed.

In the days following the crime, a reassuring observation quickly spread: there was no reason to excessively lament; after all, “Jazz” is an edition of 250 copies, held in museums and libraries around the world. As if the existence of other volumes could cancel out the concrete, singular loss of the one that was in São Paulo. One could simply, it was imagined, request an international loan and replace the missing copy. In this case, the logic of interchangeability—so practical in other domains—reveals itself as entirely inadequate.

“Jazz” is not a replaceable object. None of its copies is identical to another. Although produced through a reproducible technique, the book yields multiples that never coincide. The pochoir process—a manual stencil technique in which pigment is applied through cut masks to imitate Matisse’s painted and cut papers—demands the human hand at every impression. Greater pressure in one color, slightly irregular drying in another, small shifts in contour, vibrations of ink that settle uniquely on the paper’s surface. In short, each copy is a multiple of one.

It is revealing to recall that pochoir, though executed by specialized assistants, depends on a sequence of manual decisions that never repeat themselves exactly: the saturation of the ink, the amount of pigment absorbed by the paper, the way the hand advances or retreats along the masks. None of this follows an industrial standard. They were fertile hesitations, discrete differences that, taken together, produced substantial variations in the final result. It is this living matter—this productive error—that disappears when a copy vanishes. And no other copy, even one numbered within the same edition, shares the same visual destiny.

This principle of the multiple-as-difference is not an obscure theory, but a fact recognized and verified by the institutions that hold these albums, at this very moment, in two of the world’s most important museums. At the Grand Palais between March and July, 2026, the exhibition “Matisse, 1941–1954,” curated by Claudine Grammont and coproduced by the Centre Pompidou, presents the essential set of “Jazz” pochoir plates alongside the original gouache maquettes preserved at the Pompidou. The juxtaposition is decisive. To see, on adjoining walls, what Matisse cut and pinned to his studio wall and what the workshop of Edmond Vairel later reconstituted with stencil and brush is to confirm, by the eye and not by argument, that pochoir is not a distant version of an earlier original, but another work—one that translates, infiltrates, loses something and returns something else. Difference is not a deficiency of the technique; it is what the technique produces.

Henri Matisse. Printed by Edmond Vairel. Published by Tériade for Éditions Verve. “The Knife Thrower” from “Jazz,” 1947. The Art Institute of Chicago, Simeon B. Williams Fund. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, in the same time period, the exhibition “Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color” presents the museum’s own copy in its entirety for the first time since the institution acquired it in 1948. Seventy-eight years of waiting. This fact is more than curatorial: it is biographical. Each plate, considered separately at intervals across decades, has now finally been gathered as the album was once published. The complete face of that singular copy can be seen for the first time. What is exhibited in Chicago is not “Jazz” in general—it is the Chicago “Jazz,” with its provenance, its frame, its time of latency, its rhythm of appearance. To cross the Atlantic in order to see “Jazz” in Paris or in Chicago is not to see something equivalent to what was once held in São Paulo. It is to see other lives of the same name.

It is curious that the title of this set of visual improvisations is “Jazz”: as in music, the same score is never performed in the same way. There is a theme, there is variation, there is chance. A trumpet that breathes more deeply one night; an image that receives a little more blue in the print run. In jazz, no one plays the same solo twice. In Matisse, no one sees the same plate twice. What is called an “edition of 250” is merely a way of numbering difference.

Thus, when a copy of “Jazz” is lost, what disappears is not merely an illustrated book; what is lost is a material biography, an institutional trajectory, a constellation of visual contingencies that will never return.

In the case of the copy belonging to the Mário de Andrade Library, the story is even deeper. It is one of the rare volumes from the original 1947 edition, acquired in the years under the directorship of Sérgio Milliet, when the institution—thanks to the decisive role of Maria Eugênia Franco—resolved to acquire a collection of modern works that, at the time, astonished even the most progressive circles. No decorative reproductions. Original prints: that was the guiding principle. Yes, a print is an original work—only those who have never printed one, who have never seen ink behave like a living creature, fail to understand this.

Some years later, this same copy disappeared. It evaporated. In its place appeared a crude substitute—poorly printed, soulless, without history. It was exhibited at the state’s Pinacoteca in 2009, in a show dedicated precisely to the artist. Before hundreds of thousands of visitors, the fake posed as authentic. It was displayed closed, so as not to reveal its shortcomings. It was handled with gloves and accompanied by official reports, a farce respected by museological liturgy.

Only later did the Federal police reveal that the authentic album had been seized in Argentina, intercepted while en route to Uruguay—its final destination surely to some obscure antiquarian in Europe. And that is when I entered the story.

Henri Matisse, Printed by Edmond Vairel, Published by Tériade for Éditions Verve. “The Codomas” from “Jazz,” 1947. The Art Institute of Chicago, Simeon B. Williams Fund. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

When I assumed the directorship role at the Mário de Andrade Library in early 2013, I found the case in suspension. There was an uncomfortable truth: the original album was under the custody of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, and the Federal police were unwilling to return it without guarantees of security. The officer in charge of the case, Fábio Scliar, had decreed: “I will only return it when you prove to me that it will not be stolen again.” No municipal authority, from the highest to the lowest rank, was interested in confronting this reality (it is possible that today they no longer remember it).

The situation had to be confronted. And for that, I traveled to Rio. The office in which the officer received me seemed straight out of “The Maltese Falcon”: an old fan spinning at mid-height, papers piling up like another kind of crime, a thick folder in which the case files rested. He recounted the details of the disappearance with the precision of someone accustomed to such cases. He spoke of the former library-science student who stole to resell. Of the institutional naïveté that allowed masterpieces to be stored behind weak chains and cheap iron padlocks. And, above all, the astonishment that such a run-of-the-mill fraud had deceived so many for so long. I listened in silence, aware that any interruption would compromise the gravity of the scene. When he finished, Scliar leaned back, crossed his arms, and concluded: “The work is safer in Rio than in São Paulo.” And he was right.

I left the office with the uncomfortable sense that the work was not merely being held in Rio: it seemed to be undergoing a kind of moral quarantine, protected from São Paulo’s negligence by an external force that no longer trusted the very institution meant to protect it. It was as if the thief had robbed us twice: first by taking the album, and then by instilling a permanent doubt about the city’s capacity to safeguard what belongs to it.

A recovery plan had to be devised. Cameras, alarms, motion sensors installed. Access protocols and rigorous controls implemented. What had once been entrusted to good faith had to be formalized. But money did not fall from the sky. Nor were there patrons ready to finance heritage security. The mayor’s gaze was fixed elsewhere. I therefore resorted to what seemed to me the most improbable—and for that very reason the most effective—strategy. I invited Officer Scliar to join the Advisory Council of the Mário de Andrade Library. He accepted. He advised. He corrected. He opened doors. He shielded us from courts, bureaucrats, and, above all, from old habits.

Not until August 2015, after we had restructured the entire security system and completed a full inventory of the rare works collection, could I return to Rio and bring “Jazz” back home. We returned it as one retrieves an injured body: with care, with fear, with guilt. I left the library soon after, at the end of 2016, when my term as director ended.

That this copy has now disappeared again—on a Sunday morning, in plain sight—is no mere detail. There is a kind of symbolic recidivism, a karma that clings to the work. “Jazz” was always the music of resistance: made during the war, when Matisse was ill and Europe lay in ruins; when pain infiltrated even the most vibrant colors. Beneath the declared joy of the plates pulses the ghost of death: Icarus struck in the chest; Pierrot buried; the clown marked as a living wound; animals tortured beneath the circus tent. Perhaps it is this ambiguity—joy and abyss—that makes “Jazz” so relentlessly targeted by thieves.

For this reason, the loss cannot be settled with the comforting idea that other copies exist elsewhere in the world. This is no ordinary album. One cannot replace a piece of history, patch an absence with another object that has lived other lives.

Henri Matisse, Printed by Edmond Vairel. Published by Tériade for Éditions Verve. “The Wolf” from “Jazz,” 1947. The Art Institute of Chicago, Simeon B. Williams Fund. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Each copy of “Jazz” is a singular life: they differ in printing, in circulation, in the institutions that housed them, in the hands that leafed through them, in the cities that forgot them, and in the clandestine borders they crossed. The Mário de Andrade copy is not interchangeable with those at Harvard, in Paris, or in New York. It is a “number” only in cataloguing terms; in the world, it is a living person. And like every person who disappears, it leaves behind a specific, irreparable void.

It will perhaps be noted that at the very moment in which Paris’ Grand Palais exhibits the entire “Jazz” alongside the gouache maquettes from the Centre Pompidou, and for the first time since its 1948 acquisition, the Art Institute of Chicago opens the complete album to the public, São Paulo finds itself, once again, with one less. The simultaneity is not commented upon further.

If the album reappears—and it is desirable that it does—it will not return unscathed. It will carry with it yet another fold in its biography, another episode added to the city’s history, like those marks that stubbornly remain on old buildings even after countless renovations. And if it does not return, what is lost is more than eight colored plates. What is lost is an emotional connection between São Paulo and the very idea of memory it has sought to conserve since it decided to be modern.

They say time heals all wounds. The last ten years have not healed this one. The recurrence of the theft does not surprise; it saddens. A city that has invested so much in its own image ought, at the very least, to be capable of protecting its remnants.

The irony, unintended, is that an album so marked by improvisation seems to remind us that São Paulo still needs to learn how to sustain the message before attempting variations. Until the work returns—if it returns—what is certain is the need to care for what remains. Heritage is a word that holds weight only when there is the attention to sustain it. Without that, it is ceremony.

“Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color” at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, through June 1, 2026.