In 1889 a bored 20-year-old law clerk recovering from appendicitis was handed a box of paints by his mother and found what he later called paradise. This episode follows Henri Matisse from that sickbed to his arrival in Paris in 1891, his traditional training under Bouguereau and Moreau, his days copying Chardin at the Louvre, and the 1896 trip to Belle-Île where Van Gogh’s friend John Russell introduced him to color as emotion rather than description. We examine the Humbert affair that wiped out his family’s finances and forced him back to conservative, sellable work.

Then comes 1905 and the explosion of Fauvism, named after a critic’s insult, the purchase of Woman with a Hat by Gertrude and Leo Stein, and the introduction to Picasso that became a lifelong rivalry. The conversation traces his travels to Algeria, Morocco, and exhibitions of Islamic art that flattened his spaces, his sun-drenched Nice period, the 1939 divorce and Lydia Delectorskaya’s survived suicide attempt, his decision to stay in occupied France while his ex-wife was jailed and his daughter Marguerite was tortured by the Gestapo, and the 1941 cancer surgery that left him bedridden and led to the cut-outs, the Jazz book, the Oceania murals, and the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

• Why color theory was like handing a classical guitarist a distortion pedal
• What made Fauvism a disciplined exploration rather than a stunt
• How Picasso and Matisse approached art from opposite philosophical directions
• The armchair philosophy: weaponizing beauty during the darkest period of the war
• Painting with scissors and solving the centuries-old split between line and color