Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a fighting spirit. Despite a cancer diagnosis in 1941, increasing frailty and the confines of a wheelchair, the indomitable Frenchman never stopped in his quest to make art. With what he called “une seconde vie," a second life, he embarked on a remarkable collage period, cutting and pasting pieces of colored paper into “gouaches decoupees" of birds, plants, flowers, and the female form.