The Swimming Pool

Henri Matisse, 1952

He's eighty-two. In a wheelchair. Matisse tells Lydia, his assistant, that he wants to see some divers. So they go to a swimming pool in Cannes. The sun's blazing. He can't take it. They go home. And Matisse announces, dead serious: "I will make myself my own pool." So, he gets out the scissors. He cuts swimmers, divers, and sea creatures out of paper painted blue. His assistants pin them against a long white strip running around his dining room. Almost fifty-four feet of it. He can sit down to dinner with somebody diving over his head. He called it drawing with scissors. And for the last two years of his life, he lives with this pool going around him. After he dies, it has to come off the walls. His wife and daughter want it to keep looking like that room. The walls had been covered in burlap. So they have the paper mounted on new burlap. They know burlap is bad for paper. They do it anyway. Then the burlap goes brown. Its acid starts staining the paper. In 1993, MoMA takes it down. Twenty years off the wall. The old burlap is stuck to the paper. In places, they have to take it off one thread at a time. And when the swimmers go back up, nobody glues them down. They use pins. Through the same little holes his assistants made in Matisse's dining room.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

More from Frank