Listen to a conversation between a student and her art history professor.

Woman: So I wanted to talk about this week's paper.

Man: Sure. Linda, okay, this assignment is about the work artists do late in their career. Did you choose an artist?

Woman: Well, I might write about Henri Matisse. He made these, um, cutouts, and I thought it was cool, I mean, I'd only thought of Matisse as one of the important painters in France from the early 1900s like Picasso, Marcel Duchamp. We studied a lot of their paintings, but these cutouts aren't paintings. I'm not sure how you'd categorize them. Matisse took paper covered with opaque watercolor paint in bright colors, and he cut shapes like flowers, animals, even abstract shapes out of the paper and arranged them into designs, into the pictures. He like, pinned them to the walls of his studio, even his home, and moved them around so they were constantly changing. After his earlier work, they're so different.

Man: Yes, the cutouts were certainly a striking new art form for Matisse. But you had a question?

Woman: Well, because it's such an unusual, I mean, is that okay to write about? It's not what he's most known for, so...

Man: Oh, sure, that's one reason I make this assignment--to examine where artists turn after they've achieved success, Matisse's cutouts are a great example of that. You know, when Matisse made them, they weren't really taken seriously by art critics. Some saw them as childish, but the concepts of interactivity and impermanence that they explore, these became important in later years, and today, the cutouts are celebrated.

Woman: So we're supposed to focus on one or two works in particular. There's one large cutout called the swimming pool.

Man: Ah, good choice. That's a nice way to explore the works’ relationship to its setting. As you said, all the cutouts were arranged on his studio and apartment walls at some point, but only the swimming pool is truly site-specific. Matisse created it for the large dining room of his apartment in Nice. He intended that space as the context for the work.

Woman: Oh, wow, it would have been cool to stand there and see it in that room.

Man: Yes. In fact, in general, Matisse's cutouts are better viewed in person. Woman: Oh, why?

Man: Well, for Matisse, much of the work's beauty wasn't just in the colors and shapes, but in its actual texture, the unevenness of the paint on the paper, the paper itself, that's what gives life to the cutouts. Uh, In 1947 a book of Matisse’s cutouts was published. Now, Matisse helped in the creation of this book, and it's recognized as one of the most important art books ever printed. But when he saw the finished product, Matisse hated it. He thought reproducing the cutouts on printed pages ruined them, destroyed what he called their sensitivity, their living quality.