Black Leaf on Green Background

By 1952 Matisse was in his early eighties and mostly confined to bed, his body worn down after major surgery a decade earlier had left him unable to stand long at an easel. So he changed how he worked. Assistants painted sheets of paper in flat gouache colour, and Matisse cut shapes straight out of them with scissors, pinning them into arrangements on the wall. He called it drawing with scissors, and said that cutting into colour reminded him of a sculptor carving stone. This is one of those late cut-outs, a single black leaf-like form set against a green field. The shapes came from plants and coral, the things he had watched all his life, now pared down to one clean form and two colours.