Cover by Henri Matisse.

SPEAKER 2 For Matisse himself.

But Matisse responded to this.

Voiceover ... that we see in Matisse.

Matisse. This is Luxe, Calme et Volupte.

If you choose Matisse, it means you're artistic.

SPEAKER 2 It certainly doesn't have the sensuality of many Matisse paintings, what we usually think of when we think of Matisse.

And those are one of a kind for Matisse.

I think that was a real trait for Matisse.

SPEAKER 1 And so, Pierre Matisse is at the piano.

SPEAKER 1 it's a painting of a bronze sculpture by Matisse.

looking at a really one of my favorite canvases by Henri Matisse.

Well, you know, Matisse is playing with, sort of, levels of reality here.

Voiceover And didn't Matisse call it the Death of Painting or something like that?

Hogg was an avid art collector, and owned works by Picasso, Klee, and Matisse, among others.

And some artist historians have seen it as Matisse really trying to, in a sense, answer Cubism.

He painted a portrait of Matisse, which is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Museum in Paris.

That's perfect, because the next year, Matisse, with a number of other painters, will become known as Les fauves.

Its exhibits include a wide range of impressionists and expressionists like Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Chagall, Picasso.

And this is actually in some ways, I think, the best quality reproduction we have of its original colors, unless Matisse was revising it.

Pierre Matisse, by the way, would grow up to be a really important gallery owner in New York, selling his father's work among others.

I mean, he saw this as a challenge and in some ways of course, some art historians see this as a response from Matisse.

Yeah, the chair is always sort of funny for Matisse, because he had made that comment that he got a lot of grief for, ultimately.

It's going to take Cezanne, it's going to take Gaugin, it's going to take Van Gogh, it's going to take Matisse, it's going to take Picasso

That is, Matisse had painted The Joy of Life and a lot of art historians look at this as a kind of response to that great focused canvas.

His meeting Picasso and seeing how Picasso is, in a sense, filtering Cézanne, not to mention other artists including Matisse at this point, is having an impact here.

I'm very well aware that 80 percent of my public is there to see Picasso and Matisse, and then they stumble upon my show and I keep them there.

Now the large pink one, I remember reading, and this is interesting, that this was a painting that Matisse actually destroyed, soon after this painting The Red Studio was made.

Enjoy the works of Matisse at the museum of the same name, located in a beautiful villa amidst the Gardens of Cimiez and with an impressive collection from the artist s life.

The K20 museum features work by Paul Klee, Picasso, Matisse and other international stars, while its sister museum to the south, K21 holds a collection of contemporary artwork on display in the 19th century parliament building.

SPEAKER 1 So this is Matisse really trying to sort of impose some of the strict, geometric, formal aspects of the painting to the figure itself, so that we're not seeing it as a literal rendering.

But, you know, that's perfect because some art historians actually see the rendering of that balustrade actually as, almost a kind of written expression of music that's being produced by Pierre Matisse, Picasso's son, who's at the piano.

And there is an Odalisque, of sorts, if you look directly above the chair, there's that brown figure which is wonderfulily pushed over, leaning, which is an acutal sculpture that Matisse had done just a couple of years earlier, called Serpentine.

What's amazing to me when I think about this is how it took so much effort to dismantle this tradition, although when you think about it, the tradition is by the time we get to Matisse 700, 600 years old.