Henri Matisse

French, 1869 - 1954

BiographyFrench painter. He and Picasso are generally regarded as the two greatest artists of the 20th century. Matisse, noble and serious by nature, demonstrated an almost ruthless dedication to work and progressive development. Born at Le Cateau in northern France, he was originally a student of law at Paris but enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1891 (under Bouguereau) and the École des Beaux-Arts (under Gustave Moreau) in 1892, staying there until 1896. Fellow students were Henri Manguin (1874–1949), Marquet, and Rouault. He was elected associate of the Société Nationale in 1896 after selling a painting to the nation from among the four he exhibited at the Salon du Champ de Mars, Paris. Influenced in tone and colour by Chardin and Corot, he now experienced the Impressionists and visited London (on Pissarro's advice) to look at Turner, leading him to adopt a brighter palette and make colour experiments which freed colour from association or description. Paul Signac bought his Luxe, calme et volupté (Paris, Mus. d'Orsay) from the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. At the Salon d'Automne of that year, he and his friends Marquet, Manguin, Derain, and Vlaminck made a sensational impact and were thereafter called Fauves. Michael, Leo, and Gertrude Stein began to collect his work, Leo buying Le Bonheur de vivre (Merion, Pa., Barnes Foundation) from the 1906 Indépendants.

The quest for integrity of form when applying colour at its most intense led to the abandonment of conventional spatial devices, yet, while achieving great expressive power, he turned away from Expressionism, seeking ‘balance, purity and moderation’. His stated aim, to bring comfort and express joy, was realized in pure colour and increasingly abstract compositions, a powerful mode of decorative painting. In sculpture, printmaking, illustration, and drawing, he invented and demonstrated new, influential forms.

La Danse and La Musique (1909–10; St Petersburg, Hermitage) were carried out for S. I. Shchukin, a Moscow merchant, who, like his compatriot I. A. Morosov, became an important patron. (In 1923 nearly 50 of Matisse's works from their collections were exhibited in Moscow.) He participated in the 1913 New York Armory Show and showed his Moroccan paintings and sculptures in Paris; his reputation was growing. From 1916 he began to winter in Nice and after 1922 divided his year between that city and Paris. For Diaghilev in 1920 he designed Le Chant du rossignol. For the Barnes Foundation he created the great murals La Danse between 1931 and 1933. Odalisques, models-in-interiors, fruit, plants, and flowers were chosen subjects throughout the 1930s and in 1938 he produced the first gouache découpée (see papiers collés). During the Second World War he moved to Bordeaux and St Jean-de-Luz before settling in Nice. Two operations for serious illnesses were needed in 1941; illness became intrusive and he discovered ways of working in bed.

A retrospective of his work was held at Paris in the Salon d'Automne of 1945 and 1947 saw him created Commander of the Legion of Honour. He published his Jazz and began to design the wall paintings and stained glass for the Rosary chapel at Vence (realized 1949–51) and big gouaches découpées, thus, at 80, producing the last great flowering of his art, the collaged decorations, for instance The Snail (1952–3; London, Tate).

Langton, John. "Matisse, Henri." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1692 (accessed March 7, 2012).

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