Zulma — Daily Hue for August 24, 2026
Henri Matisse · 1950 · SMK — National Gallery of Denmark
Hidden color: Light Muted Cobalt (#6669b9)
About this puzzle
Henri Matisse created Zulma in 1950, during the final and radically inventive phase of his career, when age and illness had confined him largely to bed and wheelchair. Unable to paint in the traditional sense, Matisse turned to cut paper, directing assistants to apply gouache to sheets that he then cut freehand with scissors, composing directly in color rather than drawing first and coloring after. He called this method “painting with scissors,” and considered it not a lesser substitute for painting but its own fully realized art form, one that let him work at a bold, almost sculptural scale despite his physical limitations. Zulma depicts a monumental standing female figure rendered in flat planes of ultramarine blue and orange against a backdrop of green, teal, pink, and yellow, her features reduced to essential shapes. The work belongs to a body of cutouts Matisse produced in the last four years of his life, a period widely regarded as one of the most inventive of the twentieth century and a major influence on later color field painting and hard edge abstraction. Housed today in the collection of SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, Zulma remains one of the largest examples of Matisse’s late cutout practice.