My name is Kate Neff, and I am a senior at Wakefield School in the Plains, Virginia. Following graduation in the spring of 2023, I will be attending the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia to study English and Art History as a member of the Echols Scholar program. I have always seen art as something essential to a culture, whether it comes in a visual, auditory, or written form. When all other information about a culture or group of people disappears, historians can piece together their ways of life through the art that they created. I chose to write my Senior Thesis on Henri Matisse's influence on the art world because I always wondered who was responsible for the shift from classic art with painstaking detail to the subjective modern art that now hangs in museums. As I did my research, I found that Matisse was largely responsible for this paradigm change.