Маргаритки

Matisse painted this in Paris in the summer of 1939, a few weeks before France declared war on Germany. Its first owner was Paul Rosenberg, who dealt Picasso, Braque and Matisse from a gallery on the rue La Boetie. Within a year Rosenberg, who was Jewish, had fled France, and the bulk of the collection he left behind, this canvas among it, was seized. It was recovered after the war by the American army unit that tracked looted art, returned to him, and hung in the new gallery he had opened in New York. The picture itself is built in flat shapes laid edge to edge, the flowers, the cloth and the wall behind reading almost as if they had been cut out and set down, which is how Matisse would go on working with scissors and coloured paper in his last years.