Henri Matisse

Known for: Fauvism; the late cut-paper Jazz (1947)

Henri Matisse led Fauvism — the movement named for its "wild beast" color — in 1905 and spent the following five decades exploring the relationship between color, pattern, and the representation of pleasure and ease. His late cut-paper works, made while he was confined to a wheelchair in his eighties, are among the most formally inventive works of his career. He and Picasso were considered the twin poles of modernist painting throughout the first half of the twentieth century.