Henri Matisse died at his home in Nice on November 3, 1954, at the age of eighty-four, and he had been working almost to the end. He had been born in the north of France in 1869, the son of a grain merchant, and he had studied law before an illness during a stay in hospital led him to take up painting, and he came late to the work and went to study in Paris in the 1890s. The start was late.
He became the leader of a group whose work was shown at a Paris exhibition in 1905 and was called wild, and the name stayed, and the painters were known as the Fauves, which means the wild beasts. He used flat areas of strong colour. His subjects were ordinary, for he painted a room or a window or a woman in a chair or a bowl of fruit, and he worked the same few ideas for sixty years, and the drawings he made before a picture were as much a part of the work as the paint.
He travelled and kept a studio, and he designed the chapel at Vence in the south of France in the late 1940s, and a museum of his work opened in his home town while he was still alive. That was unusual. In the 1940s, after operations that left him unable to stand at an easel for long, he began to cut shapes out of sheets of paper that his assistants had painted in flat colours, and he arranged them into pictures on the wall, and some of them are several metres across. He called it drawing with scissors.
The cut paper works were not a retreat, and some of the strongest things he made came from that period, and the method was taken up by designers and by artists who followed him. His work hangs in museums across the world, and prices for it rose through the twentieth century, and a late paper cut was sold in 2021 for a sum that made it one of the most valuable works of modern art. The method outlived him.