Henri Matisse

French painter

• Born: December 31, 1869
• Birthplace: Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France
• Died: November 3, 1954
• Place of death: Nice, France

Matisse became the leader of the French expressionists called Les Fauves, or wild beasts. When the artists of that unofficial movement dispersed, he steadfastly and daringly simplified painting to the point of abstract decoration.

Early Life

Henri Matisse (hahn-ree mah-tees) was born in extreme northern France at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the town of his grandparents, but spent his youth in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, where his father Émile had financial interests in a drugstore and a grain elevator. Little is known of the boy’s early youth, but not long after the age of ten Matisse was sent to Saint-Quentin, some distance to the south, to study Latin and Greek. Up to age eighteen, Matisse moved dutifully from one school to the next without exhibiting an inclination toward any particular profession. In 1887, however, he went to Paris to study law and did so with his father’s blessing. In three years he completed legal coursework, passed the required examinations, and returned to Saint-Quentin, where he began a monotonous existence as a clerk in a lawyer’s office.

That type of life might have continued for many years had Matisse not attended morning classes in 1889 at the École Quentin Latour, where he drew from sculpture casts, and had he not had appendicitis, necessitating a long convalescence that was alleviated by his mother’s gift of a box of paints, brushes, and an instruction manual. The latter changed Matisse’s life. Within two years, he abandoned law and traveled to Paris to prepare for entrance exams to the École des Beaux-Arts, the official, state-supported school for the arts in France. His preparation took place at the respectable Académie Julian under the well-established painter Adolphe William Bouguereau. Disagreeing with Bouguereau’s insistence on conservative modes of painting, Matisse became disillusioned, left the school, and failed his first entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts.

Frustrated but not defeated, Matisse met Gustave Moreau, a Symbolist painter and a new instructor at the École des Beaux-Arts, who allowed him to enter his class unofficially on seeing some of his drawings. In addition to Moreau’s instruction, the teacher encouraged Matisse to copy artworks in the Louvre, which he did diligently during 1893 and 1894. By the winter of 1894, he passed the entrance exam into the École des Beaux-Arts and then officially entered Moreau’s painting class. Moreau was an important key to Matisse’s development. He inspired Matisse through his enthusiastic teaching, lavish attention, and encouragement to grow independently, free of dogma or pressure for stylistic conformity. Moreau also encouraged Matisse and other students to go into the streets to study actual life and to seek out new works by painters at the galleries.

In 1895, Matisse began to paint outdoors, first in Paris and over the next few years in Brittany as well. There he met the Australian Impressionist painter John Russell, who, as a friend of Claude Monet and the late Vincent van Gogh, passed on their emphasis on remaining independent in one’s development. Coinciding with his new interest in plein air painting, Matisse became aware of Impressionism on a grand scale when the Gustave Caillebotte Bequest Collection was exhibited at the Musée Luxemburg, Paris.

A modicum of success came to Matisse in 1897 when he exhibited the painting La Desserte at the Salon de la Nationale after having been elected an associate member of the Société Nationale the previous year. Encouraged, his next several years were marked by intense drawing, painting, more study at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie F. Carrière, the studio of La Grande Chaumière, plus much travel. Those same years up through 1903 were also marked by financial hardships, yet bright spots too, such as viewing the van Gogh retrospective show at the Galérie Bernheim-Jeune. The faith that Matisse had in his independent stance, his receptivity to new currents, his great capacity for work, and his affinity for color as structure coalesced, and Matisse’s name and work were soon known with thunder.

Life’s Work

By the first years of the twentieth century, Matisse’s explorations in color and painting structure gained momentum. His canvas Luxe, Calm, et Volupté of 1904-1905 was executed almost entirely in the Neo-Impressionist manner of dots and small bars of bold colors. Its imagery alluded to an arcadian existence, its setting to the Mediterranean coast, and its title to Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage.”

Matisse understood Neo-Impressionism with its near-scientific approach to optics and perception, but with this painting he mostly derived a mosaic effect that definitely pointed him closer to abstraction. By 1905, when Matisse was in his mid-thirties, his work was still not unequivocally his in style or content. Yet, a trip the same year with painter and friend André Derain to the Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure changed his art forever.

From his collaboration with Derain and his immersion into the sun-drenched vibrant colors of southern France, Matisse reworked older paintings of Collioure and the immediate environs. In these paintings, tree trunks were painted with bold strokes and equally bold, arbitrary shots of color. Actual or descriptive colors were sacrificed for an intuitive, spontaneous approach in which each color stroke was related to all other color marks in the composition. When Matisse returned to Paris that fall, he used his new Collioure approach in a portrait of his wife entitled Woman with the Hat . Utilizing the standard society portrait mode, Matisse again disregarded actual colors and applied those reflecting his feelings of the moment.

The French public first viewed Woman with the Hat and four other Matisse paintings in the same manner at the Salon d’Automne that same year. These were joined by a number of other vigorous color experiments by his academy friends Derain, Henri Manquin, Charles Camoin, and Albert Marquet. Salon organizers assumed a new movement was forming and hung all paintings by the above men in the same room. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles, noticing that the paintings surrounded a statue in the conventional academic style, lamented that the scene reminded him of Donatello, a Renaissance sculptor, surrounded by les fauves, or wild beasts. On appearing in a printed review, the name stuck to a movement that was not intended, had no agreed-on theories, no manifesto, and no regular meetings or organization.

Vauxcelles’s reaction of shock was equaled by that of the general public, which was not impressed by unrepressed colors and did not comprehend such color as a direct expression of the joy of life. Instead most viewers were bewildered, aghast, and believed that the Fauve paintings were insulting and a hoax. By contrast, the intended messages of color for color’s sake and painting as a physical act of exhilaration were not lost on young European painters. Color became synonymous with expressionism Fauvism in France and Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter in Germany.

The Salon d’Automne of 1905 brought Matisse to the attention of wealthy collectors of modern art and patrons including Leo and Gertrude Stein, Michael and Sarah Stein, the Cone sisters Etta and Claribel, and Sergei Shehukin. Soon Matisse was pursuing even bolder color schemes and more radically simplified structure, resulting in the landmark paintings Harmony in Red (1908-1909) and the monumental diptych Dance and Music of 1910. This pair explored music and athletic rhythmic responses to it in a universal, timeless distillation. The Red Studio of 1911 was even more advanced in its reductive color space, yet it is touched with whimsy viewers are invited symbolically to pick up one of the painted crayons on a foreground table and participate in the picture.

Matisse’s appreciation of Muslim culture resulted in working voyages to North Africa in 1911-1913. In Tangier, Morocco, he conceived and developed a triptych involving a local model named Zorah, Muslim architecture, and the tropical sun reflecting on both. This immersion into a non-Western environment had a long-standing impact on Matisse, for, during the war years 1914-1918 and throughout the 1920’s, he was increasingly engrossed in an exotic visual dialogue with models in his studios whether in Paris or southern France at Nice. Typical of his oriental themes is Decorative Figure (1927), which exudes relaxed detachment and indolent luxury.

Noteworthy activity later in life included his decoration of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, France, and his extraordinary cutpaper collages. The clinically white spartan interior of the Vence Chapel is barely relieved by Matisse’s calligraphic murals of the Stations of the Cross on one wall near the altar and equally large Madonna and Child and St. Dominic compositions on the adjacent walls. The compositions were rendered in black outlines only.

Matisse’s collage work was composed of prepainted sheets of paper cut with scissors and glued to a support, often a white wall. When declining health in the 1940’s forced the artist to work in bed, paper cutouts did not represent a withdrawal from art. Through this medium, Matisse masterfully summed up themes and experiments covering a sixty-year career. Yet his compositions were anything but redundant, especially not those devoted to jazz and Caribbean rhythms. The cutouts blaze with color, energy, and a celebration of life understandable by connoisseurs and children alike. Matisse’s celebration of life came to a close at his death on November 3, 1954, in Nice, after which he was buried at Cimiez.

Significance

Coming late to art, Henri Matisse was nevertheless blessed by two factors: a tremendous capacity for work and a long life to see that energy mature. He came to painting from a preparation in law but seemed to possess an independent nature wary of influences and a willingness to explore directions even though the way was paved with doubt and disappointment.

Matisse’s innate gifts in painting revolved around color and design. He was quite content to produce near abstractions with a cross-referential color structure. His imagery was always approximately representational, and his spaces were never overly rational or splintered like those of Paul Cézanne. His art reflected the attitude that painting is a superior distraction. It was his diary, his mistress, his labor, and his intellectual stimulation. Matisse’s worlds of the studio, indolent models, Mediterranean environments, and chromatic geometry were part of an aloof existence.

Basically apolitical, Matisse worked with almost total indifference through two world wars while maintaining his own world of balanced opposites, security, and comfort. Matisse believed that the audience for fine art is relatively small and comes from the educated bourgeoisie. Thus, for that audience, he strove to produce art that would have the same soothing effect as a good armchair for tired business professionals.

Bibliography

Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Henri Matisse. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985. A long overdue examination of the role played by drawing for an artist known as one of the major colorists of the twentieth century. The text was sensitively researched, bringing to readers rarely explored ideas and frames of reference by Matisse. Contains notes and a catalog of 159 drawings.

Jacobus, John. Henri Matisse. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983. A monograph from a series on major twentieth century European modernists. The too-brief biographical overview is, however, punctuated with well-chosen drawings and well-known paintings. The main section consists of forty color plates of key paintings, each preceded by a page of interpretation.

Klein, John. Matisse Portraits. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Describes Matisse’s portraits to demonstrate how they exemplify the art of portraiture. Includes information about the artist’s relationships with his models, family, friends, and patrons.

Matisse, Henri. Henri Matisse: Drawings and Paper Cut-Outs. Introduction by Raoul Jean Moulin. Translated by Michael Ross. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Moulin’s thesis is that Matisse drew with scissors and prepainted cut paper as well as he did with a lithographic crayon.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Matisse: Fifty Years of His Graphic Art. Text by William S. Lieberman. New York: George Braziller, 1957. A survey of Matisse’s prints that reveals his lifelong fascination with the female image mystique.

Russell, John. The World of Henri Matisse, 1869-1954. New York: Time-Life Books, 1969. A cultural-historical approach to art, this is a frank, entertaining, and well-illustrated work. Russell brings to light valuable data regarding the artist’s friendships with other Fauve painters. The chapter on the early collectors and patrons is admirable in its depth.

Schneider, Pierre. Matisse. Translated by Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer. New York: Rizzoli, 1984. Herein Matisse is documented in a sumptuous and exhaustive fashion. Schneider covers every aspect of Matisse’s life and career and illustrates brilliantly the importance of drawing for an artist revered as a colorist. Stresses the importance of women in Matisse’s painting. Contains a biographical appendix and several photographs.

Spurling, Hilary. The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Early Years, 1869-1908. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1998. The first of a two-volume biography, this volume describes the artist’s work and life through 1908.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2005. The second volume in the biography is rich with details about the artist’s personal life, his artistic technique, and the creation of his work.

Wright, Alastair. Matisse and the Subject of Modernism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Focuses on Matisse’s early years, 1905 through 1913. Wright maintains that Matisse’s art in this period was influenced by the tenets of modernism.