Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954). Two Dancers (Deux danseurs), 1937-38. Stage curtain design for the ballet Rouge et Noir. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, notebook papers, pencil, and thumbtacks. 31 9/16 x 25 3/8” (80.2 x 64.5 cm). Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Dation, 1991. © 2014 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse clearly reveled in moving sensuous, responsive paint across the surface of a canvas. Yet, during the last decade of his long life—born in 1869, he died in 1954—he abandoned this time-honored way of working in favor of arrangements of shapes cut with tailor’s scissors out of sheets of paper painted with gouache. About three decades earlier, in the summer of 1912, Georges Braque had invented collage when he first added a plane of imitation wood-grain paper to a charcoal drawing, forever raising questions about the real and the fictive in modernist art. Pablo Picasso soon adopted his friend’s technique, and, together, the two young men altered the course of Cubist painting by incorporating such detritus of the real world as newspapers, sheet music, and wallpaper into their images. Matisse had been indifferent to the allure of collage in its early days, so it’s not unexpected that his approach to cutting and pasting, as a mature artist, was wholly unlike that of his Cubist colleagues. Far from appropriating fragments of actuality, his painted paper images were constructed with elements that he