Modern Art on Skateboard Decks: Matisse, Munch, Kandinsky and the Public Domain

Last updated: July 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin · 17 min read

There is a reason this part of the catalogue is small and recent, and it is not taste.

Copyright in the European Union lasts for the life of the artist plus seventy years. That rule is what separates what can legally be printed from what cannot, and it moves forward by exactly one year every January. Nothing about an artist's importance changes on that date. What changes is that the work becomes freely reproducible by anyone.

Henri Matisse died on 3 November 1954. His work entered the public domain in the EU on 1 January 2025. The Dance deck in this range could not have been made legally two years ago, and now it can. That is the entire explanation, and it is worth stating plainly because the alternative — pretending an artist range is a curatorial statement when it is partly a legal calendar — would be dishonest.

The public domain frontier

The rule in the EU is straightforward: protection runs for the artist's lifetime plus seventy years, counted from the end of the year of death. So an artist who died in 1954 is protected through 2024 and free from 1 January 2025.

Two consequences worth understanding as a buyer.

Anything more recent is not available and will not be. Artists who died after 1955 remain protected, and no amount of demand changes that. If you are looking for mid-century or contemporary names on a deck, they will not appear here, and any seller offering them is either licensed or infringing.

Term lengths also differ by country — the United States uses a different system based on publication date rather than death — so a work can be free in one jurisdiction and protected in another. We work to the EU rule.

The living artist question is separate. Public domain applies to the dead. Work by living independent artists is used under agreement and credited, which is a different arrangement entirely and not what this guide covers.

Matisse — The Dance

The Dance diptych — €230, two panels at 171 cm.

Matisse painted The Dance in 1910 for a specific staircase in a specific house. Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant with one of the most adventurous collections in Europe, commissioned two large panels for the stairwell of his mansion. The painting was not made for a gallery. It was made as architecture, to be walked past, which is the same brief a wide two-panel piece on a hallway wall answers.

Three colours do the entire job: blue for sky, green for ground, and a flat red-orange for the five figures. There is no modelling, no shadow, no perspective, no attempt to describe muscle or fabric. The figures are outlines filled with one tone. This was so far outside what painting was expected to do in 1910 that Shchukin, having commissioned it, briefly panicked about hanging it — and then went ahead.

What makes it work on a wall is exactly that flatness. Most reproduced painting loses something in reproduction, because oil surface, brushwork and glaze do not survive printing. The Dance loses almost nothing, because there was never any surface incident to lose. It was already a flat area of colour, and printing it flat onto wood is close to the honest version of it.

The original is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. An earlier 1909 version is in New York.

Munch — The Scream

The Scream — €140. Two corrections to what most people believe about it, and both make the image better.

The figure is not screaming. Munch's own account describes walking with two friends at sunset, the sky turning blood red, and stopping while the friends walked on — feeling an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure has its hands over its ears. It is hearing something, not producing it. Once you see that, the open mouth stops being an expression and becomes a reaction, which is considerably more unsettling.

There is an inscription on it. On the 1893 painting, in the red sky, someone wrote in pencil: a line to the effect that this could only have been painted by a madman. For decades it was uncertain whether this was Munch's own hand or a hostile visitor's graffiti. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway concluded, after handwriting analysis, that Munch wrote it himself. A painter defacing his own most famous work with an insult about his sanity is a strange and very modern act.

There are four versions in total — two paintings, a pastel and a lithograph — which is part of why the image circulated so widely so early.

Kandinsky — Upward

Upward (Empor) — €140, painted in 1929 during Kandinsky's Bauhaus years, and the only fully abstract work in this range.

Two things about Kandinsky are worth knowing because they change how the picture reads.

He came to painting late and by an unusual route: he trained in law and economics, taught at university level, and only committed to art around the age of thirty. The rigour of the abstract work — geometry, balance, systems — is not the rigour of a painter who gradually simplified. It is the rigour of someone who arrived with an analytical training already in place, and who wrote a book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, arguing his position before most of the painting existed.

He also associated colours with sounds directly. Colour, for him, was not decorative or symbolic but something closer to music — a yellow that sounded like a trumpet, a blue that behaved like a cello. Whether or not you accept the account, it explains why his compositions are arranged like scores: elements set against each other in intervals rather than depicting anything.

Practically, this is the easiest piece here to place. Abstraction carries no subject to clash with a room, and geometry on a warm wood ground suits contemporary interiors better than almost anything else we print.

Grant Wood — American Gothic

The American Gothic trio — €310, three panels at 256 cm. One honest note first, in keeping with how this blog handles format: the original is a single vertical panel. Presenting it across three decks is a compositional decision, not a reproduction of an original structure — unlike the Bosch triptychs, which genuinely were three-panel objects.

Nearly everything widely believed about the painting is wrong, and the true version is better.

They are not a married couple. Grant Wood intended a father and daughter. The models were his own sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby. Nan was reportedly annoyed for years at being taken for a farmer's wife rather than a farmer's daughter.

They are not farmers. A dentist and the painter's sister, posed separately in the studio, wearing costume.

The house is real and the painting is named after a window. Wood saw a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, with an incongruously large Gothic Revival pointed window in the gable — a fashionable European ecclesiastical detail on a modest wooden farmhouse. The style is called Carpenter Gothic, and the painting is named for the window, not for the people. Wood then imagined the kind of people who might live in such a house and painted them in front of it.

So the picture is a wooden American house pretending to be a Gothic cathedral, with two people who are not who they appear to be, painted by a man who was neither mocking nor celebrating them in any way critics have ever agreed on. It was read as satire, as tribute, as regional pride and as condescension, sometimes all in the same decade.

It is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it remains one of the most parodied images ever made.

Gauguin, and an honest note

Two Tahitian Women — €230, diptych, painted in 1899 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The painting itself is superb: flat planes of warm colour, figures modelled almost without shadow, a composition that owes as much to Japanese print and to Egyptian relief as to European painting. Gauguin's colour sense influenced almost everything that followed him, Matisse very much included, and the direct line from this to The Dance in this same range is easy to see.

The honest note is that Gauguin's Tahitian period is genuinely contested, and not by revisionists inventing a problem. He arrived as a French colonial subject in a French colony, wrote about it in terms that are difficult to read now, and had relationships with local girls who were young by any standard including his own century's. Museums that hold this work increasingly say so on the wall label.

We think the paintings are worth looking at and that this context belongs beside them rather than being quietly omitted. Anyone who would rather not have that on a wall has a reasonable position, and the rest of the modern range does not carry it.

Why modern work suits white walls

This is the practical point of the whole category, and it is the opposite of the advice in most of our other guides.

Renaissance, Baroque and Dutch work is built on darkness. The pictures are constructed from deep shadow with light emerging out of it, which means they need a wall that does not fight them — warm grey, charcoal, deep green, brick. Against bright white they look cut out and slightly stranded, as our dark range guide covers.

Early modern work has the opposite construction. Flat colour, hard edges, no atmospheric depth, no shadow. It was made in a period when painters were actively abandoning the illusion of space, which means it does not need a wall to supply atmosphere. It sits on white perfectly well because it is not pretending to be a window.

Three rules for this category specifically.

Modern work groups well with modern work and badly with everything else. A Matisse beside a Renaissance portrait makes both look wrong — one is a flat plane, the other is a lit space, and the eye cannot hold both premises at once. Group by period, not by colour.

Flat colour needs even light. Directional spotlighting is designed to model shadow, and these pieces have none to model. A hard spot on flat colour produces glare rather than drama. Diffuse ambient light works better — see the mounting guide for placement.

Reproduction loses less here. An oil painting built on glaze and impasto always loses something in print, because the surface is part of the picture. Work built on flat areas of colour survives reproduction far better. If you are troubled by the idea of a reproduction, this is the category where the gap between original and print is narrowest.

Frequently asked questions

Why can you legally print Matisse but not later artists?

Because copyright in the European Union runs for the lifetime of the artist plus seventy years, counted from the end of the year of death. Henri Matisse died on 3 November 1954, so his work was protected through the end of 2024 and entered the public domain on 1 January 2025 — which is why The Dance could not have been printed legally two years earlier. The same rule put Edvard Munch and Wassily Kandinsky, both of whom died in 1944, into the public domain in 2015, and Grant Wood in 2013. Artists who died after 1955 remain protected, and no amount of demand changes that. Term lengths also vary by country, since the United States calculates from publication date rather than death, so a work can be free in one jurisdiction and protected in another.

Is the figure in The Scream screaming?

No, and this is the most common misreading of the picture. Munch's own account describes walking with two friends at sunset, seeing the sky turn blood red, stopping while the friends continued on, and feeling an infinite scream pass through nature. The figure in the painting has its hands pressed over its ears — it is hearing something rather than producing it. The open mouth is a reaction to a sound coming from outside, which makes the image considerably more unsettling than the popular reading. There are four versions in total: two paintings, a pastel and a lithograph, which is part of why the image circulated so widely so quickly.

Who wrote "can only have been painted by a madman" on The Scream?

Munch himself. A pencil inscription to that effect appears in the red sky of the 1893 painting, and for decades it was unclear whether it was the artist's own hand or graffiti added by a hostile visitor. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway concluded on the basis of handwriting analysis that Munch wrote it. A painter defacing his own most famous work with an insult about his own sanity is an unusual and very modern gesture, and it sits oddly with the popular image of the painting as a straightforward expression of anguish.

Are the people in American Gothic a married couple?

No. Grant Wood intended a father and daughter, and the models were his own sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby, posed separately in the studio in costume. Neither was a farmer. The painting is also named for a window rather than for the people: Wood saw a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, with an incongruously large Gothic Revival pointed window in its gable — a style known as Carpenter Gothic — and then imagined the kind of people who might live in it. Nan was reportedly irritated for years at being taken for a farmer's wife rather than a farmer's daughter. The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

What kind of wall suits modern art best?

White or light walls, which is the opposite of the advice for older painting. Renaissance, Baroque and Dutch work is constructed out of deep shadow with light emerging from it, so it needs a wall that does not fight it — warm grey, charcoal, deep green or brick — and looks cut out against bright white. Early modern work is built from flat colour, hard edges and no atmospheric depth, because painters of that period were deliberately abandoning the illusion of space. It therefore does not need the wall to supply atmosphere and sits on white perfectly well. Flat colour also wants even, diffuse light rather than directional spotlighting, which is designed to model shadows that these pictures do not have.

Why is Gauguin's Tahitian work controversial?

Because the circumstances of its making are genuinely difficult, not because of a recent reinterpretation. Gauguin arrived in Tahiti as a French colonial subject in a French colony, wrote about the people and place in terms that are hard to read today, and had relationships with local girls who were young by the standards of his own century as well as ours. Museums holding the work increasingly include this on wall labels rather than omitting it. The paintings remain historically important — the flat planes of warm colour influenced Matisse directly, and the line from this work to The Dance is easy to trace — but anyone who would prefer not to hang it has a reasonable position.

Article summary

deckarts prints early modern work — Matisse, Munch, Kandinsky, Grant Wood and Gauguin — with singles at €140, diptychs at €230 and the American Gothic trio at €310. The range exists on a legal timetable: EU copyright lasts for the artist's life plus seventy years, which put Grant Wood into the public domain in 2013, Munch and Kandinsky in 2015, and Matisse only on 1 January 2025. Matisse painted The Dance in 1910 for the stairwell of Sergei Shchukin's Moscow mansion, using three flat colours and no modelling at all. The figure in Munch's Scream is covering its ears rather than screaming, and the pencil inscription calling the painter a madman was confirmed in 2021 to be Munch's own. Kandinsky came to painting from law and economics and associated colours directly with sounds. American Gothic shows the artist's sister and his dentist, not a farming couple, and is named after a Carpenter Gothic window in Eldon, Iowa. Gauguin's Tahitian work carries real historical difficulties that belong beside it. Practically, modern work suits white walls and even, diffuse light — the reverse of the advice for older painting — and loses less in reproduction, because flat colour has no surface incident to lose.

About the author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of deckarts, a graphic designer and print specialist originally from Ukraine, now based in Berlin, where he personally designs and prepares every deck. Follow the work on Instagram or at stasarnautov.com.