Acrobats (Acrobates) 

Spring – Summer 1952 

Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, and charcoal on paper

The first thing that came to my mind was that there were two people doing exercise together. The blue bodies really caught my attention and thus dragged me to the painting. These two blue people were bending backwards, like some kind of dance that someone would do around a fire in the woods. I noticed both figures were in very good shapes, as if they worked out a lot. After I read the introduction on the wall I realized that the brown patch was actually a correction of the figure on the left. The difference between the two figure was the one on the right was more abstract than the one on the left. I wondered if they were in awe, or just simply stretching. The caramel colored canvas relates to nostalgia, and gave me warmness. The bumpy surface showed that Matisse gave a lot of his thought on this, so many adjustments were made.