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Henri Matisse
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born December 31, 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy, France
died November 3, 1954, Nice
in full Henri-Emile-Benoît Matisse artist often regarded as
the most important French painter of the 20th century. The
leader of the Fauvist movement around 1900, Matisse pursued
the expressiveness of colour throughout his career. His
subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct
Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.
Formative years
Matisse, whose parents were in the grain business, displayed
little interest in art until he was 20 years old. From 1882
to 1887 he attended the secondary school in Saint-Quentin;
after a year of legal studies in Paris, he returned to
Saint-Quentin and became a clerk in a law office. He began
to sit in on an early-morning drawing class at the local
Ecole Quentin-Latour, and, in 1890, while recovering from a
severe attack of appendicitis, he began to paint, at first
copying the coloured reproductions in a box of oils his
mother had given him. Soon he was decorating the home of his
grandparents at Le Cateau. In 1891 he abandoned the lawand
returned to Paris to become a professional artist.
Although at this period he had, in his own words, “hair like
Absalom's,” he was far from being a typical Left Bank
bohemian art student. “I plunged head down into work,” he
said later, “on the principle I had heard, all my young
life, expressed by the words ‘Hurry up!' Like my parents, I
hurriedup in my work, pushed by I don't know what, by a
force which today I perceive as being foreign to my life as
a normal man.” This 19th-century gospel of work, derived
from a middle class, northern French upbringing, was to mark
his entire career, and soon it was accompanied by a
thoroughly bourgeois appearance—gold-rimmed spectacles;
short, carefully trimmed beard; plump, feline body;
conservative clothes—which was odd for a leading member of
the Parisian avant-garde.
Matisse did not, however, become a member of the avant-garde
right away. In 1891, in order to prepare himself for the
entrance examination at the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
he enrolled in the privately run Académie Julian, where the
master was the strictly academic William-Adolphe Bouguereau,
then at the peak of a since-departed fame as a painter of
bevies of naked, mildly provocative nymphs. That Matisse
should have begun his studies in such a school may seem
surprising, and he once explained the fact by saying that he
was acting on the recommendation of a Saint-Quentin painter
of hens and poultry yards. But it must be remembered that he
himself was for the moment a provincial with tastes that
were old-fashioned in a Paris already familiar with the
Post-Impressionism of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and
Vincent van Gogh. His earliest canvases are in the
17th-century Dutch manner favoured by the French Realists of
the 1850s.
In 1892 he left the Académie Julian for evening classes at
theÉcole des Arts Décoratifs and for the atelier of the
Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, withoutbeing required to take the entrance
examination. Moreau, a tolerant teacher, did not try to
impose his own style on his pupils but encouraged them
rather to develop their personalities and to learn from the
treasures in the Louvre. Matisse continued, with some long
interruptions, to study inthe atelier until 1899, when he
was forced to leave by Fernand Cormon, an intolerant painter
who had become the professor after Moreau's death. After
that, although he was nearing 30, he frequented for a time a
private academy where intermittent instruction was given by
the portraitist Eugène Carrière.
In 1896 Matisse exhibited four paintings at the
backward-looking Salon de la Societe Nationale des
Beaux-Arts and scored a triumph; he was elected an associate
member of the Salon society, and his Woman Reading (1894)
was purchased by the government. From thispoint onward he
became increasingly confident and venturesome, both as an
artist and as a man. During the nexttwo years he undertook
expeditions to Brittany, met the veteran Impressionist
Camille Pissarro, and discovered the series of Impressionist
masterpieces in the Gustave Caillebotte Collection, which
had just been donated—amid protests from conservatives—to
the French nation. His colours became, for a while, lighter
in hue and at the same time more intense. In 1897 he took
his first major step towardstylistic liberation and created
a minor scandal at the Salon with The Dinner Table (La
Desserte), in which he combined a Renoir kind of luminosity
with a firmly classical composition in deep red and green.
In 1898 he married a young woman from Toulouse, Amélie
Parayre, and left Paris for a year, visiting London, where
he studied the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, and working in
Corsica,where he received a lasting impression of
Mediterranean sunlight and colour.
Revolutionary years
During 1898, Paul Signac, the theoretician and actively
proselyting leader (after the death of Georges Seurat) of
the Neo-Impressionists, or Pointillists, published in the
literary review La Revue Blanche his principal manifesto,
“D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme.” Matisse, back
in Paris in 1899, read the articles and, without turning
into an immediate convert, became interested in the
Pointillist idea of obtaining additive mixtures of colour on
the retina by means of juxtaposed dots (points in French) on
the canvas. He furthered his research into new techniques by
buying, from the well-known modernist dealer Ambroise
Vollard, a painting by Cézanne, The Three Bathers; one by
Gauguin, Boy's Head; and a drawing by van Gogh. Often
accompanied by his close friend Albert Marquet, who was also
interested in the problem of pure colour, he began to paint
outdoor scenesin the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in
suburban Arcueil, andfrom the open window of his apartment
overlooking the Seine.
He also purchased from Vollard the plaster model of the
bust of Henri Rochefort by Auguste Rodin, and during 1899 he
began to attend an evening class in sculpture. His early
workin three dimensions, the first of some 60 pieces he
executed during his lifetime, reveals the influence not only
of Rodin but also of Antoine-Louis Barye, generally
considered the greatest French sculptor of animals.
After 1899 he ceased to exhibit at the Salon and gradually
became a familiar figure in the Parisian circles where
modern art was being produced and ardently discussed. In
1901 he showed for the first time in the juryless, eclectic
Salon des Independants, which had been founded in 1884 as a
refuge for painters unacceptable to the official exhibition
juries. In 1902 he was in a group show at the small gallery
of Berthe Weill, and the next year he and a number of his
old classmates from Moreau's atelier and the Academie
Carrière were the progressive contingent in the liberal,
newly createdn Salon d'Automne. But in spite of such
recognition, he was often on the brink of financial
disaster. In 1900 he was obliged to accept work on the
decoration of the Grand Palais, which was being erected to
house part of the new Exposition Universelle in the
Champs-Elysées quarter. His wife opened a dress shop in the
hope of helping to make ends meet. In 1901 an attack of
bronchitis forced him to take a long rest. During part of
1902 he had to return to Bohain with his three
children—Marguerite, Jean, and Pierre—and Mme Matisse. He
was past 34 when, in June 1904, at Vollard's gallery, he had
his first one-man show, and it was a failure.
He spent the summer of 1905 with Andre Derain at Collioure,
a small French fishing port on the Mediterranean, near the
Spanish border. In the dazzling sunshine he rapidly freed
himself from what he called “the tyranny” of Pointillism.
The carefully placed little dabs required by the
additive-mixture approach turned into swirls and slabs of
spontaneous brushwork, and the theoretically realistic
colours exploded into an emotional display of
complementaries: red against green, orange against blue, and
yellow against violet. Representative of this new freedom
were Open Window, which was finished at Collioure, and Woman
with the Hat, a portrait of his wife painted back in Paris
in September. That fall, the two pictures were exhibited at
the Salon d'Automne alongside works by a number of artists
who also had been experimenting with violent colour. The
Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles called the group les fauves
(“the wild beasts”), and thus Fauvism, the first of the
important “isms” in 20th-century painting, was born. Almost
immediately Matisse became its acknowledged leader.
Almost immediately, too, his financial situation altered for
the better. The Stein family in Paris—Gertrude, her brothers
Leo and Michael, and the latter's wife, Sarah—became Matisse
collectors. In 1906 the artist had a show at the Galerie
Druet in Paris in addition to exhibiting again at the Salons
des Indépendants and d'Automne. In 1907 a group of admirers,
who included Sarah Stein and Hans Purrmann, organized for
him a Left Bank art school, in which he taught off and on
until 1911. In 1908 he exhibited in New York City, Moscow,
and Berlin.
Fauvism was too undisciplined to last long, and soon its
adherents were moving, according to their temperaments,
toward Expressionism, Cubism, or some kind of
neo-traditionalism. Matisse had no liking for these
directions, and if “Fauve” is taken to mean simply a painter
with a passion for pure colour, he can be said to have
remained one all his life. He had, however, too much
rationalism in his outlook not to wish for some order in a
stylistic situation that threatened to become chaotic, and
his search for chromatic equilibrium and linear economy can
be followed ina series of major works produced between the
revelation of Fauvism in 1905 and the end of World War I. In
1906 he painted Joy of Life; in 1908, The Dessert, a Harmony
in Red; in 1911, The Red Studio; in 1915, Goldfish; in 1916,
Piano Lesson; and in 1918, Montalban, Large Landscape.
In such works, the list of which should be much longer, the
main characteristics of Matisse's mature painting style
recur constantly. The forms tend to be outlined in flowing,
heavy contours and to have few interior details; the colour
islaid on in large, thin, luminous, carefully calculated
patches; shadows are practically eliminated; and the
depicted space is either extremely shallow or warped into a
flatness that parallels the plane of the canvas and defies
academic rules for perspective and foreshortening. The total
effect, although too intense and freehand to be merely
decorative, may recall the patterns of the rugs, textiles,
and ceramics of the Islamic world. The choice and treatment
of subject matter imply optimism, hedonism, intelligence, a
fastidious sensuality, and, in spite of the many studies of
both clothed and unclothed women, scarcely a trace of
conventional sentiment.
Riviera years
In 1912 Matisse's sculpture was on view in New York City and
his painting in both Cologne and London. In 1913 he was
represented by 13 pictures in the much-discussed,
much-lambasted New York Armory Show, and when the exhibition
arrived in Chicago he was given some useful publicity by the
burning, happily merely in effigy, of his Blue Nude. But
middle age, growing affluence, an established international
reputation, the disruptions of World War I, and a distaste
for public commotion gradually combined to isolate him from
the centres of avant-gardism. He began to winter on the
French Riviera, and by the early 1920s he was mostly a
resident of Nice or its environs. His pictures became less
daring in conception and less economical in means. Like many
of the painters and composers during these years (notably
Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky), Matisse relaxed into a
modernized sort of classicism and into a rather evident
attempt to please an art public that was a bit tired of
attempts to shock it. Such typically Nice-period worksas the
Odalisque with Magnolias and Decorative Figure on an
Ornamental Background, however, are masterpieces that
deserve their popularity.
Prosperity did not make him less industrious. In 1920 he did
the sets and costumes for Sergey Diaghilev's production of
Le Chant du Rossignol . He returned to sculpture, which he
had neglected for several years, and by 1930 he had
completed his fourth and most nearly abstract version of
The Back, a monumental female nude in relief, on which he had
been working at intervals since 1909. He relaxed, as he had
always done, by traveling: to Etretat, on the coast of
Normandy, in 1921; to Italy in 1925, and to Tahiti, by way
of New York City and San Francisco, in 1930. During 1933 he
visited Venice and Padua (Italy), and in Merion,
Pennsylvania, completed and installed the final version of
his large mural, The Dance II (Barnes Foundation).
Matisse had been interested in etching, drypoint,
lithography, and allied printmaking techniques since his
first years in Paris and had produced a number of occasional
prints. In 1932 he had published, as illustrations for an
edition of Stephane Mallarme's Poesies, 29 etchings, in
which his talent for supple contours and linear economy was
subtly attuned to the “purity of means” evident in the
poems. After the outbreak of World War II, he became
increasingly active as a graphic artist, notably with his
illustrations for Henry de Montherlant's Pasiphaé (published
in 1944), Pierre Reverdy's Visages (1946), the Lettres
portugaises (1946), Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal
(1947), Pierre de Ronsard's Florilage des Amours (1948), and
Charles d'Orleans' Poèmes (1950). Along with these books in
mostly black and white techniques, he published Jazz
(1947),a book consisting of his own reflections on art and
life, with brilliantly coloured illustrations made by a
technique he called “drawing with scissors”: the motifs were
pasted together after being cut out of sheets of coloured
paper (hand-painted with gouache in order to get the desired
hue).
During the last years of his life, he was a rather solitary
man who was separated from his wife and whose grownup
children were scattered. After 1941, when he underwent an
operation for an intestinal disorder, he was bedridden much
of the time; after 1950 he suffered from asthma and heart
trouble. Cared for by a faithful Russian woman who had
beenone of his models in the early 1930s, he lived in a
large studio in the Old Hôtel Regina at Cimiez, overlooking
Nice. Often he was obliged to work on his mural-sized
projects from a studio bed with the aid of a crayon attached
to a long pole. But there are no signs of flagging creative
energy or of sadness in his final achievements; on the
contrary, these works are among the most daring, most
accomplished, and most serenely optimistic of his entire
career.
At Vence, a Riviera hill town where Matisse had a villa from
1943 to 1948, he completed in 1951, after three years of
planning and execution, his Chapelle du Rosaire for the
local Dominican nuns, one of whom had nursed him during his
nearly fatal illness in 1941. He had begun by agreeing to
design some stained-glass windows, had gone on to do murals,
and had wound up by designing nearly everything inside and
outside, including vestments and liturgical objects. Before
the chapel was finished, he was at work on the huge
coloured-paper cutouts—amplifications of what he had done in
the illustrations for Jazz—that made him in manyrespects the
“youngest” and most revolutionary artist of the early 1950s.
He died in 1954.
Roy Donald McMullen
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