THE SWIMMING POOL
HENRI MATISSE, 1952
He's 82. In a wheelchair. The brush is mostly over. So he picks up scissors. Matisse tells his assistant he wants to go see some divers. So they drive him out to a pool in Cannes. The sun is brutal. He can't take it. They turn around and go home. And on the way back, he announces, dead serious: "I will make myself my own pool." Which, come on. At 82, most people accept that the pool is behind them. Matisse makes one. Out of paper. On the walls of his own dining room. So look at it. Blue figures, cut out of painted paper. Swimmers, divers, things from the sea. Wrapped around the room in a strip just above your head. Almost fifty-four feet of it. A room that turned into a pool. And the paper is the joke and the answer at the same time. Paper bends. Water bends. Sixty years he'd spent trying to paint movement, and somehow scissors got him there faster than a brush ever did. He pinned them up and lived with them for the last two years of his life. Now, paper doesn't last. The backing rotted. The whole thing sat in storage for years. It almost disappeared. But here it is. A pool, made of nothing but blue paper and scissors, by a man who couldn't stand up. Give Matisse a wall and two bad hands, and he'll still make you want to jump in.