Matisse, Henri

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MATISSE, HENRI

MATISSE, HENRI (1869–1954), French painter.

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a village in Picardy, into a petit bourgeois family of the Aisne département in northern France. After law studies, while working as a legal clerk in Saint-Quentin, he fell ill. It was during his convalescence, at the age of twenty-one, that he took up drawing and painting. In 1892 he settled in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and joined the atelier of Gabriel Ferrier (1847–1914). After attending the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, he decided to enter the École des Beaux-Arts. There he studied under Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), who told him, prophetically, that he was destined to "simplify painting." Two paintings stand out from Matisse's years of training: Nature morte aux livres (1890; Still life with books) was inspired by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779); La desserte (1897), done in lighter colors, would undergo several modifications in subsequent years. The influences of Gustave Moreau and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) were unmistakable in Matisse's work up to 1903; these two predecessors gave him the wherewithal to think in and through color.

Gustave Moreau died in 1898; to aid his family, Matisse collaborated with Albert Marquet (1875–1947) on the decoration of the Grand Palais for the upcoming Universal Exposition. Matisse's work began attracting attention from 1901; he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d'Automne, and mounted a oneman show at the Ambroise Vollard gallery. In 1904 the directors of the Beaux-Arts acquired his copy of Balthazar Castiglione, a painting by Raphael (1483–1520). In the same year, during a summer stay with Paul Signac (1863–1935), Matisse offered his own interpretation of divisionism in the shape of his painting Luxe, calme, et volupté. The following summer he spent with André Derain (1880–1954) in the small Mediterranean town of Collioure in French Catalonia, abandoning the pointillism of Signac and Georges Seurat (1859–1891) under the influences first of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and then of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). He painted La femme au chapeau (1905; Woman with a hat), Le portrait de Derain (1905; Portrait of Derain), and La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure (1905 The open window, Collioure)—all major works that were to cause an uproar at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and propel Matisse to leadership of the fauvist movement. Another fauve canvas of his, La joie de vivre (1905–1906), was bought by Leo Stein.

In 1906 and 1907 Matisse traveled a good deal, notably in Algeria and Italy, but little sign of this is to be discerned in his work of the time, save for the mild exoticism of the palm trees in the background of Nu bleu (Souvenir de Briska) (Blue nude [Memory of Briska]), painted in 1906. This picture marked an important stage in the artist's development, for it corresponds to the moment when Matisse turned to simplified forms and to the systematic use of flat areas of paint, a shift clearly discernible, too, in the evolution from Luxe I to Luxe II (1907–1908). Both paintings have as their subject three women bathers against a marine background, and they encapsulate Matisse's stylistic development at that time. The theme of the nude recurred throughout the artist's work, ending only in 1952. It was embodied in the sculpted series of Dos (back views), extending from 1908 to 1931, and in the Blue Nudes created by means of gouache on paper cut-outs. The various versions of Nu de dos (Dos I, Dos II, …) bore witness to Matisse's continuing research, which also had an impact on his painting, as discernible notably in La musique (1910) and La danse (1909–1910). These two canvases were commissioned by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who had just bought another major painting by Matisse, La desserte rouge/Harmony in Red (1909).

From 1907 to 1909 Matisse ran an art academy, but his pedagogical activity was short-lived. All the same, it bore witness to his desire to disseminate his theory of color as sensation. In December 1908, he published "Notes of a Painter" in La grande revue, a text in which he developed his notion of an art of balance. In the still lifes that he painted in Tangier in 1913, Matisse worked with space, complicating it, and played with and around motifs, incorporating the decorative aspect of fabric into his disposition of planes. In 1913, too, Matisse took part in the Armory Show in New York and Chicago, showing a sculpture, three drawings, and thirteen canvases, including Blue Nude (Memory of Briska), which thoroughly outraged the critics.

After World War I, Matisse's work came under the sway of a powerful Oriental exoticism that gave rise to a series of paintings of odalisques—L'odalisque au fauteuil turc (1928; Odalisque on a Turkish sofa), for example—and to works like

Les Marocainsi (1916; The Moroccans). These pictures, distinctly less innovative in their composition, won plaudits for Matisse from the very critics who had earlier disparaged him.

Matisse's first gouache paper cut-outs (paper painted with gouache, which was then cut and glued onto a new canvas) were produced in 1927 for the magazine Verve. This was an approach that enabled him to sculpt in and through color, using scissors; in this way he set about redefining the issues associated with line and volume. Eventually the new technique generated such major works as Deux danseurs (1937–1938; The two dancers), La piscine (1952; The swimming pool), where the blue gouache is applied to human and animal forms, or the album Jazz, published in 1947. Also in 1947, Matisse was named a commander of the Legion of Honor. From 1948 to 1951, he devoted himself to the decoration of Saint Mary's Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, contributing to architectural decisions as well as designing stained-glass windows and frescoes.

Matisse's artistic career was not confined to painting and sculpture. He was also an engraver (illustrating works of Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Henri de Month-erlant), a tapestry maker, and a set designer for the ballets Song of the Nightingale (1920) and The Red and the Black (1939). Two years before his death, Matisse was present at the inauguration of the museum that bears his name in his home town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis.

See alsoFauvism; Painting.