Music

Matisse finished this in the spring of 1939, a few months before Europe went to war. It shows two women in a flat field of green and red, one of them holding a guitar, and it looks effortless. It was anything but. Matisse photographed the canvas 18 times between the middle of March and the middle of April that year, watching himself push the two figures around until neither one overpowered the other. He was in his late sixties, still working through the problem he had chased his whole life, how to make a few shapes and a few strong colours sit in perfect balance. The war would soon scatter much of the Paris art world, yet none of that pressure shows here. The picture stays fixed on the quiet weight of the guitar and the two seated bodies that hold the whole composition still.