Henri Matisse died of a heart attack on 3 November 1954 in Nice, France. He was 84.
By then he had been in poor health for thirteen years, ever since an operation for cancer in 1941, and he spent most of that time working from a bed or a wheelchair.
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The heart attack was not the close call. In 1941, when Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer, the illness forced him to prepare his family for his death. The operation worked, but the complications nearly killed him, and he spent three months in bed.
He lived thirteen more years. He called them a second life, and he filled them with some of the boldest work of his career. I think that is the real answer: the death in 1954 was an ending, but the near death of 1941 was a deadline, and he treated it like one.
What did Matisse write from his hospital bed in Lyon?
A letter, and it did not sound like a man in danger. In a letter dated 15 January 1941, written from the Clinique du Parc in Lyon, Henri Matisse described his intestinal operation as not significant or dangerous, according to the Morgan Library's summary. He hoped to be better in a few weeks and back at work.
The cancer was in the duodenum, the first stretch of the small intestine. The surgery itself went well, but the complications that followed nearly killed him. Years later, an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris took its title from his own words for what came next: a second life.
He was staring at three months flat on his back, far from any easel.
What You'll Discover
What he did with three months in bed.
Who the nurse behind his last project was.
What hung on his bedroom wall.