Matisse’s influence on the Woodman family is evident not only in the joie de vivre and cut-out forms of Betty Woodman’s ceramic sculptures, but also in the architectural sensibilities that inform both her and George Woodman’s work. George’s site-specific paper tile installations, in particular, invite comparison to Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire—not through direct lineage, but through a shared devotion to formal clarity, and the transformative potential of scale and repetition.

In a 1952 letter to George, Betty wrote of her visit to the chapel: “I liked the Matisse chapel in Vence very much, wonderful colors and light and whiteness.” The chapel’s luminosity—achieved through floor-to-ceiling stained glass in “ordinary” blue, green, and yellow magnified and spiritualized through scale—relies on the restraint of its interior: black line drawings of figures and florals rendered on white ceramic tiles, conceived to heighten the impact of the colored light and preserve the Dominican simplicity of the space. Matisse, confined to a wheelchair in his final years, often reworked his drawings obsessively and distilled elaborate forms into disembodied, quintessential signs. This pursuit of purity finds resonance in Woodman’s modular tilings. Rejecting hidden meanings and topical content, he sought clarity through form, aiming for what he termed “monumental triviality”—in which the grace and decorum of visual language supersede symbolic meaning. In the catalogue for his tilings at Wright State University in 1981, Woodman wrote: “Works of art exist for us primarily as the source of moving or interesting experiences. Equally important may be the kind of presence they have for us when simply sharing our space... It can be refreshing to have our attention directed to inventiveness itself as a respite from responding to the objects of invention.”

A lifelong atheist, Matisse envisioned the chapel to be the “first totally pure building... in our times,” a sanctuary of light that would ease burdens and radiate joy. For the Woodmans, whose devotion lies in art itself, the chapel—and Matisse’s oeuvre—is a testament to art’s capacity to console and to elevate, through its immensity.