Still Life with a Magnolia

In January 1941 Matisse was operated on in Lyon for cancer of the duodenum. He was 71, the surgery nearly killed him, and he spent months in clinics before getting back to Nice in May. He called everything that followed his second life. This is one of the first large canvases of it, painted in his flat in the old Hotel Regina above Nice between 25 August and 21 October 1941, a good deal of it from bed. He drew the objects 68 times first, working through the spiral of the shell, the grooves of the pewter jug, the handles of the copper pot, and had the successive states of the painting photographed. The magnolia flower reads as white and is painted in a faint blue, because nothing else would look white against that red. Asked in 1945 which of his own pictures he liked best, he named this one.