Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954) was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker and designer, regarded with Pablo Picasso as one of the two artists who most defined the visual art of the twentieth century. [1] He was the leading figure of Fauvism, whose intense, non-descriptive colour broke decisively with nineteenth-century painting, and in his final years developed the cut-paper gouaches découpées that constitute a distinct late body of work. [2]
Early life and turn to painting
Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France, the son of a grain merchant, and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, a town known for textile production whose patterned fabrics left a lasting mark on his sense of decoration. He studied law in Paris and was working as a legal clerk when, during a long convalescence from appendicitis in 1889, his mother gave him a box of paints. [1]
He abandoned law and returned to Paris to study, first at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and then at the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau, who encouraged his students to develop individual styles. His early work was dark and tonal, and shifted after his exposure to Impressionism, to the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh, and to the Neo-Impressionist technique of Paul Signac. [3]
Fauvism
At the Salon d'Automne of 1905, Matisse exhibited alongside André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck works whose strident, arbitrary colour led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe the room as a cage of fauves, or wild beasts. The name was adopted for the movement. [2]
Woman with a Hat and The Green Stripe, portraits of his wife Amélie built from unblended patches of colour, provoked both ridicule and serious attention, and were bought by the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-06) and the large canvases Dance and Music, commissioned by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, established colour and rhythmic line rather than modelling and perspective as the structural basis of his painting. [1]
Nice and the interwar years
From 1917 Matisse spent much of each year in Nice on the Mediterranean coast. The work of this period is quieter and more sensuous: odalisques in patterned interiors, windows opening onto the sea, still lifes in which flat decorative pattern and spatial depth are held in balance. [3]
He worked continuously in other media, producing sculpture, etchings, book illustrations and designs for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. His 1908 essay Notes of a Painter set out his aims in print. He was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
Late work and the cut-outs
Surgery for abdominal cancer in 1941 left Matisse largely confined to a bed and wheelchair for his last thirteen years. Unable to stand at an easel for long, he developed a method of cutting shapes from sheets of paper painted with gouache and arranging them into compositions, which he described as drawing with scissors. [2]
The results, among them Jazz, The Snail and the Blue Nudes, are now regarded as a major achievement rather than a substitute for painting. In the same period he designed the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, completed in 1951, including its stained glass, murals, vestments and furnishings; he considered it his masterpiece. [4]
Matisse died in Nice on 3 November 1954.
Legacy
His influence extends through Abstract Expressionism, colour field painting and later abstraction, and the cut-outs in particular have shaped graphic design and contemporary art. [1]
