The war years
When did Henri Matisse and his wife separate?
Henri Matisse
He and his wife of 41 years separated in 1939. In 1941, he underwent surgery in which a colostomy was performed. Afterwards he started using a wheelchair, and until his death he was cared for by a Russian woman, Lydia Delektorskaya, formerly one of his models. With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a large scale, called "gouaches découpés". His Blue Nudes series feature prime examples of this technique he called "painting with scissors"; they demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power. In the 1940s he also worked as a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over one hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris. In 1941, a nursing student named Monique Bourgeois responded to an ad placed by Matisse for a nurse. A platonic friendship developed between Matisse and Bourgeois. He discovered that she was an amateur artist, and taught her about perspective. After Bourgeois left the position, Matisse sometimes contacted her to request that she model for him. Bourgeois became a Dominican nun in 1946. Matisse was much admired and repeatedly referred to by the Greek Nobelist poet Odysseas Elytis. Elytis was introduced to Matisse through their common friend Tériade, during the work on the "Cutouts". Matisse had painted the wall of the dining room of Tériade's residence, the "Villa Natacha" in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, which Elytis also mentioned in his poems. Matisse, thoroughly unpolitical, was shocked when he heard that his daughter Marguerite, who had been active in the Résistance during the war, was tortured (almost to death) in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. (Marguerite avoided further imprisonment by escaping from the Ravensbrück-bound train, which was halted during an Allied air strike; she survived in the woods until rescued by fellow resisters. )Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. In 1947 he published "Jazz", a limited-edition artist's book of about one hundred prints of colourful paper cut collages, accompanied by his written thoughts. Tériade, a noted twentieth-century art publisher, arranged to have Matisse's cutouts rendered as pochoir (stencil) prints.