Henry Matisse 1869-1954

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) was a French artist, noted for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draftsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century (Wikipedia).

Born Henri Émile Benoît Matisse in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis. He first took up painting during a period of convalescence following appendicitis. Little more than a year later, in 1890, he had abandoned law and was studying art in Paris. The classes consisted of drawing from plaster casts and nude models and of copying paintings in the Louvre (Hermatage).

He soon rebelled against the school's conservative atmosphere; he replaced the dark tones of his earliest works with brighter colors that reflected his awareness of Impressionism (Schantz). He began to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In 1892, Matisse entered the atelier of Gustave Moreau, whose highly finished Salon paintings were preceded by adventurous experiments with color and symbolism that were important to Matisse's later development. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, he made color a crucial element of his paintings. Many of his paintings made between 1899 and 1905 make use of a pontillist technique adopted from Signac (Hermatage).

His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he moved southwards in 1905 to work with André Derain and spent time on the French Riviera. His paintings of this period are characterized by flat shapes and controlled lines, with expression dominant over detail. He became known as a leader of the Fauves, a group of artists which also included Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck. The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did nothing to affect the rise of Matisse; he had moved beyond them and many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917 when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse (Hermatage).

He was a friend as well as rival of the younger Picasso, to whom he is often compared. A key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists are women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors.

Throughout his career Matisse employed his serene and joyous imagery in mediums outside the fine arts -- book illustration, tapestry and rug design, and architectural decoration. In 1941 he was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he used a wheelchair. Matisse did not allow this setback to stop him working however, and with the aid of assistants he started creating cut paper collages called gouaches découpés, often large. These works, which achieve an ultimate blending of Matisse's vibrant color with the energetic flow of his line, are considered by many to be his best. Matisse's supreme accomplishment, which may be seen in all his work, was to liberate color from its traditionally realistic function and to make it the foundation of a decorative art of the highest order (Ratcliff).