Henri Matisse was born in 1869, and died in 1954, at 84. In 1941, he underwent surgery for abdominal cancer; it left him bed-bound. Matisse called these years his “second life,” and in that life he returned to a technique he had toyed with in 1919—cutouts and cut-paper collages—which he used in the decor for Stravinsky’s opera Le chant du rossignol. Matisse cut and pasted while dreaming of his days in Tahiti, thinking of folktales, mythology, and Paris music halls. “There is no break between my old pictures and my cut-outs,” the artist said in 1951, “except that with greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.” In this show, 230 paintings, drawings, books, and cut-out gouaches, dating from 1941 to 1954, embody the artist’s last visionary flights. —Elena Clavarino