Matisse’s Surprises, with John Walsh

In a series of four lectures, art historian John Walsh looks at the sixty-year career of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), perhaps the most widely admired of all modernists. With Matisse, one astonishing phase follows another, decade by decade: conservative realism; then jolting, dazzling color; then ambitious variations on cubism; then intimate interiors, some with odalisques; then large-scale decorations. Matisse remained a figurative artist in all media. He was never more surprising than in his last decade when, as a semi-invalid, he took on major projects of design, from paper cutouts to large murals and stained glass.