Henri Matisse was born in 1869, and died in 1954, at 84. In 1941, he underwent surgery for abdominal cancer, which left him bed-bound. He called these years his “second life,” and in that life he returned to a technique he had toyed with in 1919, when he designed the decor for Stravinsky’s opera Le chant du rossignol: cut-outs and cut-paper collages. 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.” This important exhibition explores these work of paper. —Elena Clavarino