Nu Azul IV

By 1952 Matisse was in his eighties and rarely left his bed in Nice, a decade after the cancer surgery that ended his life as a painter who stood at an easel. So he worked with scissors instead, cutting shapes from sheets his assistants had painted a flat blue. This was the fourth of four blue nudes he made that year, and the first he attempted. He filled a notebook with studies and spent about two weeks cutting and pinning the pieces before the pose satisfied him, the legs folded and one arm bent back behind the head. You can still see charcoal marks around the figure where he tested the placement of an arm or a hip before committing the paper to it.