At the end of 1917, Matisse settled in Nice, where he spent most of each year for the remainder of his long life. In the decades that followed, he hardly forgot his period of extreme experimentation. In the 1930s, for instance, he drew on the lessons of 1913–17, recovering his earlier paintings’ clarity of design and reviving his interest in serial processes in order to achieve what he called “a certain formal perfection.” He painted Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) (1935; The Baltimore Museum of Art), a reprise of Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra), by reworking the composition at least 20 times on the same canvas. He also revived his bathers motif for a new decorative commission, Dance (1932–33; The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Penn.), and returned to his bas-relief Back. In the 1940s and 1950s, he made monumental paper cutouts that—like his 1913–17 works—mediate between painting and sculpture. In the end, Matisse’s period of radical invention reveals itself as both a surprising, indispensable part of his oeuvre and a fascinating moment in the history of 20th-century art—a moment when an artist of sensuous line and color explored what it might mean to embrace austerity of form and technique, developing his own “methods of modern construction.”