The career of Henri Matisse, who is often considered to be the greatest French painter of the twentieth century, had several important stages. His first major works were identified with the group of artists known as the Fauves (or "wild beasts") because of their violent colors and their nonrealistic treatment of space and form. In Matisse's second phase he retreated to somewhat more realistic representations of sunny Mediterranean scenes and became more interested in creating patterns than in breaking down the relationships between forms and space. But, at the end of his life, Matisse once again rejected standard types of representation and worked with paper cutouts, creating works that focused on the effects of movement, color, and shape.
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