With interviews and animations and using Matisse’s words, taken from his diaries and letters, this film sees Matisse’s great-granddaughter Sophie Matisse tell the tumultuous story of his early life.
Matisse picked up a paintbrush at the late age of 21, and the next 15 years saw him turn his back on the bourgeois aspirations of his parents and teachers, suffer extraordinary financial insecurity and family drama that nearly ended his career, and create a series of such notorious public scandals that he came to be known as ‘the wild beast’, an artistic savage whose work threatened the very values of western civilisation.
