Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

French Painter, 1862 - 1918

Henri Matisse, a French painter, was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Matisse was the leader of the Fauves, a group of painters who started the first important art movement of the era. Matisse, one of the rare artists to achieve worldwide recognition during his lifetime, was considered a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression.

Matisse's work reflects a number of influences: the decorative quality of Near Eastern art, the stylized forms of the masks and sculpture of Africa, the bright colors of the French Impressionists, and the simplified forms of French artist Paul Cezanne and the Cubists.

Matisse's favorite subjects included human figures, still lifes, and domestic scenes of interiors. He believed that a painting was more important as an object of art than as a representation of reality. He made no attempt to create the illusion of realistic forms and space. Instead, he used intense color and lines to produce patters and a sense of movement. Many experts believe Matisse excelled all his contemporaries in the use of color. His paintings feature unusual color combinations and elaborate patterns.

Matisse was born in December of 1869 in Le Cateau, near Cambrai, in France. He entered law school in 1887 but began to paint in 1890 as a pastime while recovering from an appendectomy. In 1892, he moved to Paris to study art full time. His first teachers were conservative and Matisse's own early style was a conventional form of naturalism, painting with dark colors and making many copies after the old masters.

During this time, Matisse began to study more contemporary art, including that of the Impressionists, and he began to experiment, earning a reputation as being rebellious in his studio classes.

By 1899, Matisse began experience his own artistic liberation through the influence of the French painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne and the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh was to prove a constant source of inspiration and artistic challenge throughout Matisse's lifetime. It was during this time that Matisse began to experiment in the use of color to render forms and organize spatial planes.

In 1903 and 1904, Matisse began to study the pointillist painting of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac. Cross and Signac were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes, or "points", of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it, using bolder, broader strokes.

By 1905, Matisse had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, including a striking picture of his wife, Green Stripe (Madame Matisse). The title refers to a broad stroke of brilliant green that defines Madame Matisse's brow and nose. In the same year Matisse exhibited this and similar paintings along with works by his artist companions, including Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together, the group was dubbed Les Fauves (literally, "the wild beasts") because of the extremes of emotionalism in which they seemed to have indulged, their use of vivid colors, and their distortion of shapes.

Matisse's Fauvist years grew into an abandonment of three-dimensional effects in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shape, and strong pattern. The intellectual splendor of this dazzlingly beautiful art appealed to the Russian mentality, and many great Matisses are now in Russia. Among the many important commissions he received was that of a Russian collector who requested mural panels illustrating dance and music (both completed in 1911; now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). Such broad themes perfectly suited Matisse; they allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers, and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Even his sculpted work emphasizes the expressive form rather than the literal.

From the 1920s until his death, Matisse spent much time in the south of France, particularly Nice, painting local scenes with a thin, fluid application of bright color. Matisse's works during the 1920's have a decorative quality reminiscent of the art of the Near and Middle East.

Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He believed that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design, and he explained the rhythmic, but distorted, forms of many of his figures in terms of the working out of a total pictorial harmony.

In his last years, Matisse was diagnosed as having duodenal cancer and was permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. In this last phase, too weak to stand at an easel, he created his papercuts, carving in colored paper, scissoring out shapes, and collaging them into sometimes vast pictures. These beautifully daring works are the nearest he ever came to abstraction.

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