Beasts of the Sea

Matisse went to Tahiti in 1930 and stayed about three months, mostly looking. He floated over the lagoon, watched the coral and the fish, and painted almost nothing while he was there. Twenty years later the lagoon came back to him. Surgery in 1941 had left him working from a bed and a wheelchair in Nice, unable to stand at an easel for long, so he took up scissors instead, cutting shapes straight out of paper that assistants had painted for him with gouache in the colours he asked for. He called it drawing with scissors. The shapes here read as seaweed, coral, fish and other lagoon creatures, stacked in two tall columns against blocks of blue, green and violet. The finished piece stands close to three metres high, and it was pinned to the wall of his room in that arrangement before anything was fixed down.