"Matisse said that the ‘revelation’ - as he called it - of what his art was to be came to him one day when, as a young pupil at the École, he was waiting for a telephone call in a post office. What was this decisive revelation? That there are two ways of representing a model, animate or inanimate. The first, the one he taught at school, consists in identifying things through love: it is his mother who emerges from the sheet. Significantly, the vehicle for this revelation, which was to be at the root of the most profound pictorial revolution of our century, was drawing." (Pierre Schneider, extract from the exhibition catalogue)