For more than a decade, Alexander Liberman spent his summers traveling throughout Europe to interview and photograph the aging members of the School of Paris, including Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and others. In 1949 and again in 1951, he visited Matisse, who was in a state of prolonged convalescence. According to Liberman, everything in the artist’s studio was “arranged so that his slightest desire, his slightest urge for expression, could be easily set into action. Illness became a justified excuse for eliminating all unnecessary activity.” Here he captured Matisse in the living room of his apartment in Nice at work on a paper cut-out design for the dust jacket of the forthcoming book Matisse: His Art and Public.

Label from Matisse and the Art of Jazz, January 20–July 1, 2018