Henri Matisse

Look at *The Joy of Life* (1905-06) — a glade of pink and orange nudes lying in pairs and standing in clusters, the figures simplified almost to outline against a flattened landscape. The painting was scandalous in its first season because viewers could not place it; it was neither classical nor caricature, and the colour did not behave the way colour was supposed to. Then jump forty years to *The Snail* (1953) or *Blue Nude II* (1952), and the curve of a hip has become a single piece of cut paper pinned to a wall. The figure has not disappeared — it has been distilled.

On the consumed-observation to commissioned-devotion axis the Artist Studies arc reads through, Matisse sits at the far end of devotion, but the devotion is unusual. It is not to the sitter (most of the late work has no specific model), and it is not to a patron. It is to the surface itself — to colour as a structural element rather than a descriptor of objects, to the painted shape as a thing in its own right. The Chapel of the Rosary at Vence (1948-51), which he called the masterpiece of his old age, is a religious commission he treated as a chance to work the surface at architectural scale: stained glass, line drawing, vestments, all reduced to the same primary moves. Vela reads him for what colour does when figuration is stripped to its essentials, and for the long discipline that distillation actually required.