Die rumänische Bluse

Matisse worked on this canvas across the winter of 1939 into 1940, the months when France went from the outbreak of war to defeat and occupation. None of that shows. He photographed the picture at 14 stages, and the sequence records a long act of subtraction: he began with a patterned armchair, a floral background and a woman seen from above, then stripped almost all of it away. What survives is a Romanian peasant blouse he had collected, its embroidered sleeves opening across the canvas like a flower. The face is only a few strokes and the hands are barely sketched, so that the blouse, and not the woman, becomes the thing you look at.