The paper cutouts, prepainted with blue gouache, synthesized the intrinsic qualities of both painting and drawing— form, color, and line—and allowed the artist "to draw in paper," as he described it. This new idiom, which he had used for the first time in 1931 (while developing his large composition Dance for Dr. Albert C. Barnes), enabled him to create images in which form and outline were inseparable.

Inspired from his earlier work "La Piscine", Matisse created Femmes et Signes (Women and Monkeys). Using a band of white paper as a backdrop and tan burlap, a popular wall covering of the time, Matisse cut his own women, monkeys and pomegranates, out of paper painted in an ultramarine blue. The blue forms were pinned on the white paper, which helped define the moving the sitting female figures, standing monkeys, and ascending fruit.