Henri Matisse

(French, 1869 - 1954) 

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
— Henri Matisse

Post-Impressionist Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the twentieth century and rival to Picasso in innovation. He was a superstar of the Paris Art School, indeed of the twentieth century art world, and co-founder of Fauvism. His impact on modern art cannot be overstated. Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create light-filled ambiance in his Fauve paintings, and rather than using shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, he used contrasting areas of bold, unmodified color. Matisse once said he desired his art to be “of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.” He wanted his art to be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair.”

Henri Matisse was born in December of 1869 and raised in a small industrial town in northern France. His family worked in the grain business, and as a young man, Matisse labored as a legal clerk and studied for a law degree between 1887-89. He took drawing classes in the mornings before work. Disappointing his father, a couple years later Matisse moved to Paris to study art, and older artists at schools such as the Académie Julian and École des Beaux-Arts shared their knowledge with him. With model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894.

In 1896, then an unknown art student, Matisse visited artist John Russell on an island off the coast of Brittany. Russell was an Impressionist painter – a style that Matisse had never previously seen directly. Matisse was so shocked at the style that he left after ten days, saying, “I couldn't stand it anymore,” but returned a year later as Russell's student. He left his earth-colored palette behind for bright Impressionist colors. In 1898, he and Amélie Noellie Parayre married and they raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (1899) and Pierre (1900). Matisse often used Marguerite and Amélie as models. Matisse showed his work in large group exhibits in Paris starting in the mid 1890s, and his pieces gained popularity. By the 1900s, Matisse was submitting art to the Salon des Indépendants. During this time, he was under the artistic influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac who painted with small dots of color in a Pointillist style, which was a form of Neo-Impressionism. He held his first one-man exhibition at the gallery of dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1904.

In 1905, he and fellow artist André Derain submitted works to the Salon in a radical new style at the Salon d'Automne of 1905. The critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the painters with the phrase “Donatello chez les fauves” (“Donatello among the wild beasts”), referring to a Renaissance-style sculpture by Albert Marque displayed in the same room as them and contrasting it with their “orgy of pure tones”. Thus, their movement came to be called Fauvism. The new movement swelled for three years, leaving an indelible mark on the art world. Fauvist works have bright colors to the point of pure color, strong brushwork, and loose structure. Much of Matisse’s mature work emphasizes this style, capturing a mood, not so much a realistic image. His subjects remained traditional – portraits of friends and family and arrangements of figures in rooms or landscapes. Still life and the nude remained favorite subjects throughout his career. The art of other cultures also heavily influenced Matisse. He saw several exhibitions of Asian art, traveled to North Africa, and incorporated some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese prints into his own style.

Matisse, his contemporary, Picasso, and Leo and Gertrude Stein formed a social circle and gathered on Saturday evenings. More and more people began attending as well; everybody brought somebody. Among Picasso's acquaintances who also frequented the Saturday evenings were Fernande Olivier, Georges Braque, André Derain, the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin and Henri Rousseau. Matisse’s friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris. Operating from 1907 until 1911, Matisse instructed young artists in a private and non-commercial school. Matisse then spent seven months in Morocco from 1912 to 1913. His odalisques and orientalist topics of later paintings can be traced to this period. WWI began in 1914, and in 1917 he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, where his work softened and relaxed in the post-war period. In the 1920s he actively collaborated with artists of a variety of ethnicities. After 1930, his work became bolder and simpler, foreshadowing his famous cutout technique. WWII began in 1930, and Matisse’s 41-year marriage with Amelie ended when she suspected he was having an affair with his young Russian-born assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya. Delectorskaya tried to kill herself, shooting herself in the chest, but she survived and recovered, returning to Matisse and working as his trusted personal and professional assistant until he passed away.

While the Nazis were in control of France from 1940 to 1944, Matisse almost went to Brazil to escape the Occupation, but decided to stay in Nice. The Occupation was more lenient on “degenerate art” in Paris than it was in the German-speaking nations; Matisse was allowed to exhibit along with other former Fauves and Cubists, whom Hitler had claimed to despise – but Jewish artists were prohibited, their works removed from all French museums and galleries. Any French artists exhibiting in France, including Matisse, had to sign an oath assuring their “Aryan” status. Although he was never a Resistance member himself, his family was part of the French Resistance. His estranged wife, Amélie, typed for the French Underground and spent six months in jail. His eldest child, Marguerite, was active in the Resistance and was tortured almost to death by the Gestapo in a prison, then sentenced to a concentration camp in Germany where she managed to escape from the train while it was halted for an air raid. She survived in the woods until rescued by fellow resisters. Matisse’s son, Pierre, an art dealer in New York, represented French artists and helped them to escape occupied France, if necessary, and enter the United States. Pierre held the now-legendary exhibition in New York, Artists in Exile in 1942. Sadly, Rudolf Levy, Matisse's student, was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and started using a wheelchair following a difficult surgery. Before undergoing the risky operation, he wrote an anxious letter to his son, Pierre, insisting, “I love my family, truly, dearly and profoundly.” He left another letter, in the event of his death, making peace with his ex-wife Amélie. Instead, Matisse received what he called “Une seconde vie”, (a second life) of the last fourteen years of his life. The new lease on life led to an extraordinary burst of expression, the culmination of half a century of work, but also to a radical renewal that made it possible for him to create what he had always struggled for: “I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say.” With the aid of Lydia Delectorskaya and other assistants, he set about creating cut paper collages, often on an enormous scale, called gouaches découpés. By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career. The cutout was not a renunciation of painting and sculpture: he called it “painting with scissors.” Matisse said, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.” The experimentation with cut-outs also offered Matisse chances to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: "You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird." His cutouts are among the most admired and influential works of the artist’s entire career.

Matisse moved to Vence in 1943, and late in his career, he received several commissions, including a mural for an art gallery in Pennsylvania and poetry illustrations. His final project was creating a program of decorations for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence including murals, furniture, and stained-glass windows. In 1941, a nursing student named Monique Bourgeois had responded to an ad placed by Matisse for a nurse, and they had developed a platonic friendship. She was an amateur artist and he taught her about perspective. Bourgeois left the position and joined a convent in 1944, and Matisse would sometimes ask her to model for him. Bourgeois became a Dominican nun in 1946, and Matisse began the chapel in 1947 in her honor. The small modern building on the grounds of the Dominican nuns' residence in Vence took almost four years to complete.

Matisse died at age 84 of a heart attack November 3, 1954. Over a six-decade career, he was a prolific painter, but also worked in multiple mediums, including sculpture, printmaking, and more. Although his subjects were conventional, his radical use of brilliant color and exaggerated form to express emotion inspired his own contemporaries and future movements. He will be in the canon forever as one of the most prominent, groundbreaking, and influential artists of the twentieth century. His legacy of color and light lives on in his historically transformative modern art masterpieces.

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