Two Young Girls in a Red and Yellow Interior

Matisse was in his late seventies when he painted this, and by then he worked mostly from a bed or a wheelchair. A cancer operation in 1941 had nearly killed him, and he called the years he was given afterward a second life. You would not know any of that from the picture. Two girls sit in a room built almost entirely out of flat red and yellow, the colour as fearless as anything he had done 40 years before. It comes from near the end of his painting: by about 1950 he had set the brush aside for good and taken up paper and scissors, cutting his shapes straight from painted sheets. The collector Albert Barnes bought this in 1949, the last Matisse he ever acquired, and wrote to the dealer that it was the most important piece of the artist's late work he had seen.