Mark Paskewitz is a Southern California pharmaceutical development professional with experience managing a variety of successful clinical trials. Passionate about art history, Mark Paskewitz particularly enjoys the works of French Impressionists and those who followed, including Henri Matisse.

A Heard Museum exhibit in Phoenix, titled Yua: Henri Matisse and the Inner Arctic Spirit, draws attention to an aspect of the French modernist that few are aware of. The route to these late works involved Matisse’s exile to Nice and the French Riviera in 1940, following the Nazi invasion of France.

With his daughter staying in Paris and risking her life as part of the Resistance, Matisse was fighting his own personal struggle against cancer. Undergoing surgery in his 70s and just barely surviving, Matisse came to see all that followed as “extra time.” He embarked on new forms of art with new enthusiasm, including cutouts and masks, which he copied from the Inuit masks his son-in-law collected.

Fascinated by masks from his early years, Matisse drew dozens of Yup’ik masks from Alaska, which had shamanistic dancing and ceremonial uses. Combining naturalistic, sculptural qualities and spiritual meanings, the masks attracted Matisse for their complex, highly symbolic aesthetic. The Heard Museum exhibition pairs Matisse’s drawings with actual Yup’ik masks crafted from natural elements such as feathers, wood, hide, and baleen.