Zulma

When Matisse made Zulma in early 1950 he was past 80 and could no longer stand at an easel for long. A cancer operation in 1941 had left him mostly in bed or a wheelchair, so he took to cutting shapes from paper his assistants had painted in flat colour and pinning them straight to the wall. He called it drawing with scissors. Zulma is a tall woman, nearly two and a half metres, standing between two little tables with a vase of flowers, her body a band of orange against cool blue. She is nobody in particular, an imagined Eastern figure rather than a portrait. The cut-out was shown in Paris in 1952 and bought that June by the museum in Copenhagen where it still hangs.