“Cut-and-pasted paper was a way for a painter to conceptualize his work. Picasso and then Matisse took this from a low level, a hidden technique, and put it out front, on the surface, in the art ...

In September 1940, less than three months after Paris had surrendered to Hitler’s armies, artist ... Matisse gradually abandoned easel painting, experimenting with prints, inventing cut-paper ...

So he began cutting abstract forms from sheets of paper that had been painted ... In a personal account now in the Matisse Archives in France, the artist’s assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya ...