LIFE with Matisse

On Tuesday, December 4, New York’s Metropolitan Museum will unveil a relatively small but, by all accounts, revelatory exhibition of works by one of the true giants of 20th-century Modernism. Comprised of 49 canvases, Matisse: In Search of True Painting focuses — as the show’s catalog has it — on Matisse’s tendency throughout his long career to “use his completed canvases as tools, repeating compositions in order to compare effects, gauge his progress, and, as he put it, ‘push further and deeper into true painting.’” This all comes more than five decades after a 1951 exhibition at MoMA celebrated in LIFE magazine as “a monumental exhibit [that] crowns a lifetime of creativity by the 81-year-old modern master.” Here, recalling that 1951 show, and in celebration of the current exhibition at the Met (In Search of True Painting runs through March 2013), LIFE.com offers a few photographs of Matisse — most of which never ran in LIFE — by the great Ukrainian-born photographer Dmitri Kessel.