Throughout his career Matisse employed his serene and joyous imagery in mediums outside the fine arts -- book illustration, tapestry and rug design, and architectural decoration. From 1944 to the end of his life, he produced decoupes, in which he cut shapes from colored paper and pasted them onto fields of white. These works, which achieve an ultimate blending of Matisse's vibrant color with the energetic flow of his line, are considered by many to be his best. Matisse's supreme accomplishment, which may be seen in all his work, was to liberate color from its traditionally realistic function and to make it the foundation of a decorative art of the highest order.



Henri Matisse  31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a  French Artist, known for his use of color and his fluid and original draftsmanship. He is known primarily as a painter although was also a draftsman and sculptor.  Although he was initially labeled a Fauve  (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in Modern Art.

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