Master of Color
1869 — 1954
"Henri Matisse was the leader of young rebel artists who brought the modern art movement into being in Paris in the early 1900s. He was a master of color, a supreme draftsman who imbued a relatively small range of subject matter with constant variety."
Henri Matisse was the century's most loved and well-traveled painter. Art was his obsession, and to create paintings of such visual excitement he chose a life of discipline and calmness. His name was Henri Matisse and he was one of the most famous artists that ever lived.
Born on December 31, 1869, near France's Belgian border in Le Cateau, Picardy, Henri hated the northern winters. He traveled south where there was more light in the day. The artist was the son of a grain merchant, and the law had been chosen as his profession. It took some persuasion over parental objections for Matisse to begin the art studies he yearned for.
Henri Matisse began as a lawyer because his father sent him to law school. When he was in school he showed little interest in art. Matisse started to work at a law office when he became very ill. His mother brought him a small paint box to help him pass the time. Henri then gave up law and left for Paris to study art. The artist destroyed his early commercial work, counting his emancipation from that day.
In Paris he studied under Gustave Moreau, and from 1893 to 1896 he produced sober still lifes and other quiet pictures influenced by Chardin and Corot. He copied old masters in the Louvre, earning his way through his schooling. In later years, telling about it, he said, "One must learn to walk firmly on the ground before one tries the tightrope."
Paris was the most exciting place in the world for artists in the late 19th century. In 1891, he was enrolled in the Academic Julian art school and stayed there until 1917. In 1893 he married Amelie Moellie Parayre. The family was supported through the sale of all the painter's still lifes to a dealer who paid 400 francs apiece for them.
Authentic Matisse lithographs, prints, and signed collectibles
Henri was part of an artist group called the Fauves. He started the first important movement in the 1900s. Henri was the most famous of the Fauves and took the leadership in the movement.
The Fauves ("Wild Beasts") were young creative revolutionaries in the art world and counted among their number Henri Matisse and such lesser known figures as André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck, all of whom admired van Gogh and Gauguin. With their vehement emotional transformation of form and riotous use of color, the Fauves' paintings shocked turn-of-the-century Parisian audiences.
The artist's long career, begun with years of academic schooling, became set in its brilliant revolutionary course in 1905, when, in company with Rouault, Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and a few others, Matisse set Paris on its ears in the Autumn Salon. The painters were excoriated as fauves—wild beasts—and their pictures, flaming defiant canvases, were condemned as impossible. At the Salon d'Automne of 1905, critics called the works "a pot of color flung in the face of the public."
In 1908, excited comment had followed an exhibition of Matisse's paintings in the Stieglitz Gallery of New York; in 1913, at the famed Armory Show, the artist was the center of stormy debate. Opinions on the art of Matisse varied considerably. Matisse emerged as an artist of great powers, but sections of the academic world called his work "not art, but a dangerous and infectious disease."
Henri Matisse's style was unique. His favorite subjects were human figures, still life, and scenes of interiors. Not only did he paint but also made paper cutouts. He would cut out shapes of different forms and put all of them together to make a wonderful looking art piece. Matisse also made sculptures in the early years of the 1900s. His sculptures revealed an interest in African sculpture and in Rodin's treatment of forms.
Matisse loved pattern within pattern: not only the suave and decorative forms of his own compositions, but also the reproduction of tapestries, embroideries, silks, striped awnings, curlicues, mottles, dots, and spots. Indeed, Matisse once said that he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair on a tired businessman.
Henri Matisse worked with large levels of primary colors, which created an impression of light and space. Matisse was the master of simplifying colors and lines. Since Matisse was part of the Fauves, his colors were pure colors. They could achieve greater effect by using pure colors and the effect of the light in the painting was more beautiful.
Museum-quality reproductions of Matisse's iconic cut-out works
Henri Matisse lived through some of the most traumatic political events in recorded history. He lived through the worst wars, the greatest slaughters, and the most demented rivalries of ideology. Matisse never made a didactic painting or signed a manifesto, and there is scarcely one reference to a political event. Matisse did suffer from fear and loathing like everyone else, but his art work did not show it at all.
Matisse established himself permanently in Nice in 1917. When World War II started, the artist was in Paris. He made his way in stages by taxi and train back to Nice. In 1941, his son Pierre, reported that Matisse had undergone a serious operation. Friends tried to persuade the aging artist to leave France, but Matisse said, "If all the talented people left France, the country would be much poorer. I began an artist's life very poor, and I am not afraid to be poor again. Art has its value; it is a search after truth and truth is all that counts."
Henri Matisse was 72 when he had a major operation that nearly ended his life. He never fully recovered and he was not able to paint. He had to lay in bed for most of the time for the rest of his life. During his last years, he created cutouts in his bed.
On June 25, 1951, thousands of tourists and natives crowded the small village of Vence in south France to see the Bishop bless what Matisse had called his "masterpiece"—a chapel on which he had started work four years before.
Ailing and bedridden through much of this period, Matisse serenely progressed with his decorations for the chapel, drawing his designs with a long charcoal-tipped stick on the walls of his bedroom, later copying them on tiles and transferring them to stained glass. This was his last work, he announced: "My bags are packed."
Through the years that have seen his pictures become prized pieces in public and private collections in all parts of the world, the artist grew in stature. He never left his explorations, and age only increased his daring as a colorist and his brilliance and gaiety.
Matisse held no common ground with those who considered modern art as a new mode. He once said that every art is a logical reflection of the time in which it is produced—an orderly and rational development of what had gone before. On a visit to the United States in 1930, he answered the challengers of new art forms by saying, "By mechanical means an image is now fixed on a photographic plate in a few seconds—an image more precise and exact than it is humanly possible to draw. And so, with the advent of photography disappeared the necessity for exact reproduction in art."
The artist's birthdays during his last years usually found him working on a limited schedule, with congratulatory messages coming in from all over the world. At 83 he donated 100 of his works—valued at up to $14,000,000—to his hometown of Le Cateau.
In a piece he wrote for UNESCO, Matisse explained more of his theory: "An artist has to look at life without prejudices, as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, in a personal way." By way of illustration he said there was nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose. "Because before he can do so," explained the artist, "he has first of all to forget all the roses that were ever painted."
He died in his apartment in Nice on the afternoon of November 3, 1954 of a heart attack. He was 84 years old. Death came swiftly to the aged artist, who had been a semi-invalid since undergoing a serious operation in 1940. At his bedside were his daughter, Mme. Marguerite Duthite; his physician, a nurse and his secretary.
Jean Cassou, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, recalled: "Henri Matisse is one of the last representatives of French genius. If the title of master suits any artist it certainly suited him. All men deserving of this name, all men who think, can consider themselves as his disciples. His thinking has illuminated our era."
André Berthoin, Minister of National Education, stated: "His was the most French of palettes. Intelligence, reason and the alliance of a sense of finesse and of simplifying geometry gave to all he painted the rare virtue of being truly French."
Rare books and exhibition catalogs celebrating the master's work