The Snail

By the time Matisse made this, in 1953, he was in his eighties, often confined to bed, and could no longer stand at an easel for long. So he worked with scissors instead. Assistants painted sheets of paper in flat gouache colours, and Matisse cut them into blocks and had them pinned to the wall, moving them around until they were right. The big torn squares here spiral loosely outward, and the title tells you why: he had been looking at the coiled shell of a snail. It is nearly two metres across, pure colour and almost no drawing. He died the next year, in 1954, and these late cut-outs were the last thing he made.