Apples

When the 45-year-old Henri Matisse was rejected from military service at the outbreak of World War I, a friend encouraged him to contribute to the war effort the best way he could: by continuing to paint well. This led to a productive period of compositional and material experimentation that Matisse hoped would sustain the tradition of French painting in the face of a cultural and national threat.

Matisse painted this still-life composition twice—in the abstract work seen here and also in a more traditionally representational version. A hidden light source bathes the scene in warm tones, which are offset by a swath of green. Luminous black consumes the background, reflecting Matisse’s challenge to himself to use black as a “color of light, not darkness.”