Near the end of his life, when he was bedridden, Matisse created a whole world in his room. Using brightly painted, cutout shapes and long handled crayons, he decorated his bedroom-studio, transforming it into a magical world. Matisse said to a visitor : "Come in, come in. Now that I don't get up very often, I've made myself a little garden to go for walks in. Everything's here - fruit, flowers, leaves, a bird or two.' Above his head, he drew some larger-than-life heads of his grandchildren, in charcoal. `They keep me company, too.'" (16)



"George Braque, has recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier. We have seen that this faculty for finding and making underlies the child's discoveries no less than the artist's. Finding indeed, even precedes making, but it is only in making things and trying to make them like something else that man can extend his awareness of the visible world." (17)
E. H. Gombrich




"I think that man has certain moments of playfulness, and infantile things, far from being injurious to his serious work, endow it with grace, gaiety, and naivete." (18)
Gauguin



Spontaneity is often sacrificed when the end product becomes too important.



"Then with an incredibly mischievous look he went out and got another book: poems by Tristan Tzara with black-and-white pen-and-ink illustrations by Matisse. Picasso had colored all the illustrations." (19)
Rosamond Bernier

16. Rosamond Bernier, Matisse, Picasso, Miro - As I Knew Them, (N.Y., U.S.A., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991) p. 52
17. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, (Princeton, N.J., U.S.A., Princeton University Press, 1972) p.p. 313, 314
18. Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, (Berkeley and L.A., California, U.S.A., U. of Cal. Press, 1968) p.83
19. Rosamond Bernier, Matisse, Picasso, Miro - As I Knew Them, (N.Y., U.S.A., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991) p.125.