Henri Matisse

In January 1941, in Lyon, Matisse went under the knife for cancer of the bowel, and the operation nearly killed him. He was 71. The nuns who nursed him through the complications took to calling him the resurrected one, and he seemed to half believe it. For the rest of his life he spoke of the years that followed as a second life, one he had not expected to get.

That second life is where most of the Matisse people love actually comes from. Bedridden, and later confined to a wheelchair, he could no longer stand at an easel for hours. So he went back to something he had only toyed with before. He had assistants paint sheets of paper in flat, saturated gouache, and then he cut shapes straight out of them with a large pair of scissors, a diver, a leaf, a bird, a nude reduced to a few blue curves. He called it drawing with scissors, and he pinned the pieces to the walls of his room and rearranged them like a garden he could walk through without getting up.

The publisher Teriade saw the first of these and pushed him toward a book, which became Jazz in 1947, its acrobats and circus shapes printed from the cut paper. Then came the largest of the late works, the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, which he designed between 1948 and 1951 down to the stained glass, the tiled walls, the crucifix and the priests' robes. He was in his eighties by the time it was finished, working from bed with a piece of charcoal tied to a long bamboo pole so he could reach the wall, drawing the faces of the saints in single unbroken lines.