Henri Matisse

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Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse 1913

Born Henri Émile Benoît Matisse

31 December 1869

Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France

Died 3 November 1954 (aged 84)

Nice, France

Nationality French

Education Académie Julian, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Moreau

Known for Painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, collage

Notable work Woman with a Hat (1905)

The Joy of Life (1906)

Nu bleu (1907)

La Danse (1909)

L'Atelier Rouge (1911)

 Movement Fauvism, Modernism, Post-Impressionism

Patron(s) Gertrude Stein, Etta Cone, Claribel Cone, Sarah Stein, Albert C.

Barnes

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (French: [ɑ̃ʁi emil bənwɑ matis]; 31 December 1869 – 3 November
1954) was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original
draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a
painter. [1]

Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped
to define the revolutionary developments in the visual artsthroughout the opening decades of the
twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Along
[2][3][4][5]

with Picasso, Matisse helped to define and influence radical contemporary art in the 20th
century. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was being hailed
as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive
[6]

language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won
him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. [7]

Contents
[hide]

 1Early life and education

o 1.1Early paintings
 2Fauvism
 3Selected works: Paris, 1901–1910
 4Sculpture
 5Gertrude Stein, Académie Matisse, and the Cone sisters
o 5.1Selected works: Paris, 1910–1917
 6After Paris
 7War years
 8Final years
o 8.1Cut-outs
o 8.2Chapel and museum
 9Legacy
 10Recent exhibitions
 11Partial list of works
 12Illustrations
 13Portrayal in media and literature
 14Books and essays
 15References and sources
 16Further reading
 17External links

Early life and education[edit]

Henri and Amélie Matisse, 1898

Woman Reading, 1894, Museum of Modern Art, Paris

Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France, the oldest
son of a prosperous grain merchant. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In
[8]

1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-

Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother
brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He
discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply
[9]

disappointing his father. [10][11]

In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student
of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still lifes and
landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Matisse was
influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas
Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists, such as Édouard Manet, and
by Japanese art. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired; as an art student he
made copies of four of Chardin's paintings in the Louvre. [12]

In 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle
Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van
Gogh, who had been a friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style
changed completely. He later said "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour
theory to me." In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des
[11]

Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state. [13]

With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married
Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899)
and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse. [14]

In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W.
Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked
[15]

beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, and Jules Flandrin. Matisse
[16] [17]

immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he
admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a
painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, and Cézanne's Three Bathers. In Cézanne's sense
of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. [16]

Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted
after reading Paul Signac's essay, "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme". His paintings
[15]

of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a
preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis
Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, completing The Slave in
1903. [18]

Early paintings[edit]

Gustave Moreau's Studio, 1894-1895

Blue Pot and Lemon (1897), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Le Mur Rose, 1898, Jewish Museum Frankfurt

Fruit and Coffeepot (1898), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

 

Vase of Sunflowers (1898), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Study of a Nude, 1899, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo

 Still Life with Compote, Apples and Oranges, 1899, The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

Crockery on a Table (1900), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Fauvism[edit]
Main article: Fauvism
Woman with a Hat, 1905. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910. The movement as such
lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement
[19][20]

were Matisse and André Derain. Matisse's first solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard's gallery
[19]

in 1904, without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more
[16]

pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-
Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. In that year he painted the most important of
[15]

his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme et Volupté. In 1905 he travelled [15]

southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure. His paintings of this period are
characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, using pointillism in a less rigorous way than
before.
Matisse and a group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon
d'Automne in 1905. The paintings expressed emotion with wild, often dissonant colours, without
regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse showed Open Window and Woman with the
Hat at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the phrase "Donatello parmi les
fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that
shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily
[21]

newspaper, and passed into popular usage. The exhibition garnered harsh criticism—"A pot of
[19][21]

paint has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille Mauclair—but also some
favourable attention. When the painting that was singled out for special condemnation,
[21]

Matisse's Woman with a Hat, was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, the embattled artist's
morale improved considerably. [21]

Les toits de Collioure, 1905, oil on canvas, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Matisse was recognised as a leader of the Fauves, along with André Derain; the two were
friendly rivals, each with his own followers. Other members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy,
and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) was the
movement's inspirational teacher. As a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he
pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.
 In 1907 Guillaume Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange,
wrote, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's
art is eminently reasonable." But Matisse's work of the time also encountered vehement
[22]

criticism, and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His painting Nu bleu (1907) was
[11]

burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. [23]

The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did not affect the career of Matisse; 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, even though he did not quite fit in, with his
conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. He continued to absorb new
influences. He travelled to Algeria in 1906 studying African art and Primitivism. After viewing a
large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent two months in Spain studying Moorish
art. He visited Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913 and while painting in Tangiers he made
several changes to his work, including his use of black as a colour. The effect on Matisse's
[24][25][26]

art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in L'Atelier Rouge(1911). [15]

Matisse had a long association with the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin. He created one of
his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission, the other
painting being Music, 1910. An earlier version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The
Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Selected works: Paris, 1901–1910[edit]



Luxembourg Gardens, 1901, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Dishes and Fruit, 1901, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

 A Glimpse of Notre-Dame in the Late Afternoon, 1902, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

 Nu (Carmelita), 1904, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

[27]
Luxe, Calme et Volupté, 1904, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Landscape at Collioure, 1905, Museum of Modern Art

Open Window, Collioure, 1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line), 1905, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
 

Le bonheur de vivre, 1905–6, Barnes Foundation

Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt1906, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark

The Young Sailor II, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Vase, Bottle and Fruit, 1906, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia


 Blue Nude, 1907, Baltimore Museum of Art

 La coiffure, 1907, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Madras Rouge, The Red Turban, 1907, Barnes Foundation. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show

 Le Luxe II, 1907–08, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen


[28]
Les trois baigneuses (Three Bathers), 1907, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Bathers with a Turtle, 1908, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis

Game of Bowls, 1908, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

The Dance (first version), 1909, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
 Still Life with Dance, 1909, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

The Dance, 1910, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

 Les Capucines (Nasturtiums with The Dance II), 1910–12, Pushkin Museum

Music, 1910, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Sculpture[edit]
Henri Matisse, The Back Series, bronze, left to right: The Back I, 1908–09, The Back II, 1913, The Back III 1916, The Back IV, c. 1931,

all Museum of Modern Art, New York City[29][30][31]

Henri Matisse, 1900-1904, Le Serf (The Serf, Der Sklave), bronze

 Henri Matisse, 1905, Sleep, wood, exhibition Blue Rose (Голубая Роза), 1907, location unknown

 Henri Matisse, 1906–07, Nu couché, I (Reclining Nude, I), bronze, exhibited at Montross Gallery, New York, 1915

 Henri Matisse, 1907, Awakening, plaster, exhibition Salon of the Golden Fleece (Салон Золотого Руна) 1908
 

Henri Matisse, 1908, Figure décorative, bronze

Gertrude Stein, Académie Matisse, and the Cone sisters[edit]

Henri Matisse, 1933 May 20. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten

Around April 1906 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years younger than Matisse. The two [11]

became lifelong friends as well as rivals and are often compared. One 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 were women and still
lifes, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realised interiors. Matisse and Picasso
were first brought together at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B.
Toklas. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Americans in Paris—Gertrude Stein,
her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah—were important collectors and
supporters of Matisse's paintings. In addition Gertrude Stein's two American friends
from Baltimore, the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, became major patrons of Matisse and
Picasso, collecting hundreds of their paintings and drawings. The Cone collection is now
exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art. [32]

Henri Matisse, The Moroccans, 1915-16, oil on canvas, 181.3 x 279.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art[24]

While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented
among the paintings on the walls at 27 rue de Fleurus. Where the works of Renoir, Cézanne,
Matisse, and Picasso dominated Leo and Gertrude Stein's collection, Sarah Stein's collection
particularly emphasised Matisse. [33]

Contemporaries of Leo and Gertrude Stein, Matisse and Picasso became part of their social
circle and routinely joined the gatherings that took place on Saturday evenings at 27 rue de
Fleurus. Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse,
remarking:
"More and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings—and the
Cézannes: Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time
and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began." ' [34]
 Among Pablo Picasso's acquaintances who also frequented the Saturday evenings
were: Fernande Olivier (Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque, André Derain, the poets Max
Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin (Apollinaire's mistress and an artist in her own
right), and Henri Rousseau. [35]

His friends organised and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial
school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1907 until 1911. The initiative
for the academy came from the Steins and the Dômiers, with the involvement of Hans
Purrmann, Patrick Henry Bruce and Sarah Stein. [36]

Matisse spent seven months in Morocco from 1912 to 1913, producing about 24 paintings and
numerous drawings. His frequent orientalist topics of later paintings, such as odalisques, can be
traced to this period. [37]

Selected works: Paris, 1910–1917[edit]

Still Life with Geraniums, 1910, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany

L'Atelier Rouge, 1911, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

The Conversation, c.1911, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

 Window at Tangier, 1911-12, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

 

Zorah on the Terrace, 1912, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

Le Rifain assis, 1912–13, 200 × 160 cm. Barnes Foundation

 Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1913, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

 La glace sans tain (The Blue Window), 1913, Museum of Modern Art

Woman on a High Stool, 1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York City


 View of Notre-Dame, 1914, Museum of Modern Art

 Les poissons rouges (Interior with a Goldfish Bowl), Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

French Window at Collioure, 1914. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

The Yellow Curtain, 1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York

 Auguste Pellerin II, 1916–17, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

 The Painter and His Model (Le Peintre dans son atelier), 1916–17, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

 Three Sisters and The Rose Marble Table (Les Trois sœurs à La Table de marbre rose), 1917, Barnes Foundation,
Philadelphia

 Portrait de famille (The Music Lesson), 1917, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 210.8 cm, Barnes Foundation

After Paris[edit]
Self-portrait, 1918, Matisse Museum (Le Cateau)

In 1917 Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. His work
of the decade or so following this relocation shows a relaxation and a softening of his approach.
This "return to order" is characteristic of much art of the post-World War I period and can be
compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky as well as the return to traditionalism
of Derain. His orientalist odalisque paintings are characteristic of the period; while this work was
popular, some contemporary critics found it shallow and decorative. [38]

In the late 1920s Matisse once again engaged in active collaborations with other artists. He
worked with not only Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, and Spaniards, but also a few Americans and
recent American immigrants.
After 1930 a new vigor and bolder simplification appeared in his work. American art
collector Albert C. Barnes convinced him to produce a large mural for the Barnes
Foundation, The Dance II, which was completed in 1932; the Foundation owns several dozen
other Matisse paintings. This move toward simplification and a foreshadowing of the cutout
technique are also evident in his painting Large Reclining Nude (1935). Matisse worked on this
painting over a period of several months and documented the progress with a series of 22
photographs which he sent to Etta Cone. [39]

War years[edit]
Matisse's wife Amélie, who suspected that he was having an affair with her young Russian
emigre companion, Lydia Delectorskaya, ended their 41-year marriage in July, 1939, dividing
their possessions equally between them. Delectorskaya attempted suicide by shooting herself in
the chest; remarkably, she survived with no serious after-effects, and instead returned to Matisse
and worked with him for the rest of his life, running his household, paying the bills, typing his
correspondence, keeping meticulous records, assisting in the studio and coordinating his
business affairs.[40]

Matisse was visiting Paris when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940 but managed to make
his way back to Nice. His son, Pierre, by then a gallery owner in New York, begged him to flee
while he could. Matisse was about to embark for Brazil to escape the Occupation but changed
his mind and remained in Nice, in Vichy France. “It seemed to me as if I would be deserting,” he
wrote Pierre in September 1940. “If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of
France?” Although he was never a member of the resistance, it became a point of pride to the
occupied French that one of their most acclaimed artists chose to stay, though of course, being
non-Jewish, he had that option. [41]

While the Nazis occupied France from 1940 to 1944, they were more lenient in their attacks on
"degenerate art" in Paris than they were in the German-speaking nations under their military
dictatorship. Matisse was allowed to exhibit along with other former Fauves and Cubists whom
Hitler had initially claimed to despise, though without any Jewish artists, all of whose works had
been purged from all French museums and galleries; any French artists exhibiting in France had
to sign an oath assuring their "Aryan" status—including Matisse. He also worked as a graphic
[42]

artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over one hundred original
lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.
In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery, while successful, resulted in
serious complications from which he nearly died. Being bedridden for three months resulted in
[43]

his developing a new art form using paper and scissors. [44]

That same year, a nursing student named Monique Bourgeois responded to an ad placed by
Matisse for a nurse. A platonic friendship developed between Matisse and Bourgeois. He
discovered that she was an amateur artist and taught her about perspective. After Bourgeois left
the position to join a convent in 1944, Matisse sometimes contacted her to request that she
model for him. Bourgeois became a Dominican nun in 1946, and Matisse painted a chapel in
Vence, a small town he moved to in 1943, in her honor.
Matisse remained for the most part isolated in southern France throughout the war but his family
was intimately involved with the French resistance. His son Pierre, the art dealer in New York,
helped the Jewish and anti-Nazi French artists he represented to escape occupied France and
enter the United States. In 1942, he held an exhibit in New York, "Artists in Exile," which was to
become legendary. Matisse's estranged wife, Amelie, was a typist for the French Underground
and jailed for six months. Matisse was shocked when he heard that his daughter Marguerite, who
had been active in the Résistance during the war, was tortured (almost to death) by the Gestapo
in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in
Germany. Marguerite managed to escape from the train to Ravensbrück, which was halted
[10]

during an Allied air raid; she survived in the woods in the chaos of the closing days of the war,
until rescued by fellow resisters. Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in the Auschwitz
[45]

concentration camp in 1944. [46][47]

Final years[edit]
Cut-outs[edit]
See also: Jazz (Henri Matisse)
Diagnosed with abdominal cancer in 1941, Matisse underwent surgery that left him chair and bed
bound. Painting and sculpture had become physical challenges, so he turned to a new type of
medium. With the help of his assistants, he began creating cut paper collages, or decoupage. He
would cut sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache by his assistants, into shapes of varying
colours and sizes, and arrange them to form lively compositions. Initially, these pieces were
modest in size, but eventually transformed into murals or room-sized works. The result was a
distinct and dimensional complexity—an art form that was not quite painting, but not quite
sculpture.[48][49]

Although the paper cut-out was Matisse’s major medium in the final decade of his life, his first
recorded use of the technique was in 1919 during the design of decor for the Le chant du
rossignol, an opera made by Igor Stravinsky. Albert C. Barnes arranged for cardboard
[49]

templates to be made of the unusual dimensions of the walls onto which Matisse, in his studio in
Nice, fixed the composition of painted paper shapes. Another group of cut-outs were made
between 1937 and 1938, while Matisse was working on the stage sets and costumes for Sergei
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. However, it was only after his operation that, bedridden, Matisse
began to develop the cut-out technique as its own form, rather than its prior utilitarian origin.
[50][51]

He moved to the hilltop of Vence in 1943, where he produced his first major cut-out project for his
artist's book titled Jazz. However, these cut-outs were conceived as designs for stencil prints to
be looked at in the book, rather than as independent pictorial works. At this point, Matisse still
thought of the cut-outs as separate from his principal art form. His new understanding of this
medium unfolds with the 1946 introduction for Jazz. After summarizing his career, Matisse refers
to the possibilities the cut-out technique offers, insisting "An artist must never be a prisoner of
himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success…"
[50]

The number of independently conceived cut-outs steadily increased following Jazz, and
eventually led to the creation of mural-size works, such as Oceania the Sky and Oceania the
Sea of 1946. Under Matisse’s direction, Lydia Delectorskaya, his studio assistant, loosely pinned
the silhouettes of birds, fish, and marine vegetation directly onto the walls of the room. The two
Oceania pieces, his first cut-outs of this scale, evoked a trip to Tahiti he made years before.
[52]

Chapel and museum[edit]

In 1948, Matisse began to prepare designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, which allowed
him to expand this technique within a truly decorative context. The experience of designing the
chapel windows, chasubles, and tabernacle door—all planned using the cut-out method—had
the effect of consolidating the medium as his primary focus. Finishing his last painting in 1951
(and final sculpture the year before), Matisse utilized the paper cut-out as his sole medium for
expression up until his death.[53]

This project was the result of the close friendship between Matisse and Bourgeois, now Sister
Jacques-Marie, despite his being an atheist. They had met again in Vence and started the
[54][55]

collaboration, a story related in her 1992 book Henri Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence and in the
2003 documentary "A Model for Matisse". [56]

In 1952 he established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, and
this museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France.
According to David Rockefeller, Matisse's final work was the design for a stained-glass window
installed at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills near the Rockefeller estate north of New York
City. "It was his final artistic creation; the maquette was on the wall of his bedroom when he died
in November of 1954", Rockefeller writes. Installation was completed in 1956. [57]

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. He is interred in the
cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice. [58]