Still Life with Green Sideboard 1928

Henri Matisse made this painting of a sideboard with fruit, a vase and other objects with oil on canvas. Just look at those blues and greens swimming around on that canvas – it's like a world of color all its own! I can almost feel the artist's hand moving, mixing those hues, making decisions, and then changing them again. See how he's built up the surface with these deliberate, blocky brushstrokes? You can sense him, in the studio, figuring it out as he goes, responding to what's already there, letting the painting evolve. Imagine him stepping back, squinting, making small adjustments. That juicy orange sitting on the blue cloth is really singing out to me. It looks both flat and round, somehow. I love how Matisse is unafraid to flatten the perspective, to play with the tension between surface and depth. You get the sense that he's in a real conversation with painters like Cézanne, pushing and pulling at the boundaries of representation. It’s as if the history of painting is a big, ongoing party line!