On April 15, 1874, an exhibition by the "Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, etc." opened at the Parisian studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. It was a defiant response to the official, government-sponsored annual exhibition known as the Paris Salon. The first exhibition of these Société anonyme artists included works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Paul Cézanne, later known as impressionists. This now-legendary event is often considered the birth of modernist painting and remains a key moment in the history of Western art.

Paris 1874 Prints

All Impressionism Prints

Never content to rest on his well-earned laurels, Matisse kept pushing the development of his artwork even into his seventies when he turned to cut and pasted colored paper as his medium. It was both the aesthetic flourishing of his exploration of ever simplified shapes and flat planes of color as well as a means of diminishing the burdens of his infirmity and weakening eyesight.