Episode Details

Henri Matisse was training to be a lawyer when his mother handed him a box of paints during a bout of appendicitis — and he never went back to law. He spent the next six decades reinventing art, first with the violent colors of Fauvism that shocked Paris, then with the paper cut-outs he created from a wheelchair in his eighties that somehow shocked it again. He reinvented himself at an age when most artists are repeating themselves.

This episode traces Matisse from the law office to the Fauvist scandal, through his rivalry with Picasso, the odalisque paintings, and the final cut-out masterpieces that proved creative vitality has no expiration date.

• The illness that derailed a legal career and the box of paints that changed art history
• The Fauvist explosion — why critics called Matisse and his circle "wild beasts"
• The lifelong rivalry and mutual respect between Matisse and Picasso
• The wheelchair cut-outs of his final years — painting with scissors when he could no longer hold a brush