He Art of Henri Matisse Albert C Barnes Violette De Mazia
Henri Matisse (31 Dec 1869 - 3 November 1954), ane of the undisputed masters of 20th century art, was a French creative person, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, forth with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as ane of the 3 artists who helped to ascertain the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labeled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and cartoon, displayed in a torso of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition every bit a leading figure in modern fine art.
Early life and teaching
Henri Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambresis, Nord, France. He grew upward in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardy, French republic, where his parents owned a flower business concern; he was their first son. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis subsequently gaining his qualification. He first started to pigment in 1889, after his mother brought him fine art supplies during a menses of convalescence following an set on of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" every bit he later described information technology, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. In 1891, he returned to Paris to study fine 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 before masters such every bit Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by modernistic artists such as Edouard Manet, and by Japanese art. Chardin was 1 of Matisse's most admired painters; as an fine art student he made copies of iv Chardin paintings in the Louvre.
With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the ii raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse.
In 1896, Matisse, an unknown fine art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the isle Belle Ile off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to paintings of Vincent van Gogh - who had been a friend of Russell - and gave him one of Vincent van Gogh'south drawings. Matisse's style changed completely; abandoning his globe-coloured palette for bright colours. He later said "Russell was my instructor, and Russell explained colour theory to me."
In 1898, on the communication of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. Yard. Due west. Turner and and so went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899 he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, and Jules Flandrin. Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from ownership work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his abode included a plaster bosom past Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing past Van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne's 3 Bathers. In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour Matisse found his primary inspiration.
Many of Matisse'south paintings from 1898 to 1901 make apply of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac'southward essay, "Eugene Delacroix and Néo-impressionisme". His paintings 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.
Fauvism
His offset solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard'due south gallery in 1904, without much success. His fondness for brilliant and expressive color became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri Edmond Cantankerous. In that year he painted the most of import of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme et Volupté. In 1905 he traveled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure. His paintings of this catamenia are characterized by flat shapes and controlled lines, and use pointillism in a less rigorous way than before.
In 1905, Matisse and a group of artists now known every bit "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne. The paintings expressed emotion with wild, often anomalous colours, without regard for the subject field's natural colours. Matisse showed Open Window and Woman with the Hat at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles described the piece of work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello amid the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-blazon sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 Oct 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily paper, and passed into popular usage. The exhibition garnered harsh criticism "A pot of pigment has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille Mauclair but as well some favorable attending. When the painting that was singled out for special condemnation, Matisse's Woman with a Hat, was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, the embattled artist's morale improved considerably.
Matisse was recognized 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'southward inspirational instructor; as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he pushed his students to retrieve outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.
What I dream of is an fine art of rest, purity, and tranquility devoid of troubling or depressing subject affair... a soothing, calming influence on the heed, something like a expert armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. "
- Henri Matisse
In 1907 Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Just Matisse'southward work of the fourth dimension also encountered vehement criticism, and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Nu bleu was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913.
The decline of the Fauvist motility after 1906 did nothing to affect the rise of Matisse; many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917, when he was an agile office of the smashing gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did non quite fit in, with his bourgeois appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. He continued to blot new influences: after viewing a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent ii months in Espana studying Moorish art. The effect on Matisse'southward art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in Fifty'Atelier Rouge (1911).
Matisse had a long association with the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin. He created 1 of his major works La Danse particularly for Shchukin equally function of a two painting commission, the other painting being Music, 1910. An before version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Fine art in New York Metropolis.
Gertrude Stein, Académie Matisse, and the Cone sisters
Around 1904 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 12 years younger than Matisse. The 2 became life-long friends as well as rivals and are often compared; i key difference betwixt them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most oft by both artists were women and nevertheless life, with Matisse more probable to identify his figures in fully realized interiors. Matisse and Picasso were commencement brought together at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas. During the commencement decade of the 20th century, Americans in Paris, Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah were important collectors and supporters of Matisse'south paintings. In addition Gertrude Stein's ii American friends from Baltimore, the Cone sisters Clarabel and Etta, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their paintings. The Cone collection is now exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented amongst the paintings on the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Where Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso's works dominated Leo and Gertrude Stein's collection, Sarah Stein's collection emphasized Matisse.
Among Pablo Picasso's acquaintances who likewise frequented the Sabbatum 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 ain right), and Henri Rousseau.
His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a individual and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1907 until 1911. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were amongst several of his about loyal students.
In that location are always flowers for those who want to see them. " - Henri Matisse
Afterwards Paris
In 1917 Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. His work of the decade or and then 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 menses, and can be compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky, and the return to traditionalism of Derain. His orientalist odalisque paintings are characteristic of the period; while popular, some contemporary critics establish this work shallow and decorative.
In the late 1920s Matisse notably once again engaged in active collaborations with other artists. He worked with not only Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, and Spanish, but likewise a few Americans and recent American immigrants.
Afterwards 1930 a new vigor and bolder simplification appeared in his work. American art collector Albert C. Barnes convinced him to produce a big landscape for the Barnes Foundation, The Dance Two, which was completed in 1932. The Foundation owns several dozen other Matisse paintings.
He and his married woman of 41 years separated in 1939. In 1941, he underwent surgery in which a colostomy was performed. Subsequently he started using a wheelchair, and until his death he was cared for by a Russian woman, Lydia Delektorskaya, formerly one of his models. With the aid of assistants he set about creating cutting paper collages, often on a large calibration, called gouaches découpés. His Blueish Nudes series characteristic prime examples of this technique he called "painting with scissors"; they demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for color and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power.
In 1947 he published Jazz, a limited-edition book containing prints of colorful paper cut collages, accompanied by his written thoughts. In the 1940s he also worked equally a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over ane hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.
Matisse, thoroughly unpolitical, was shocked when he heard that his girl Marguerite, who had been active in the Résistance during the war, was tortured (nigh to expiry) in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration campsite.
Co-ordinate to David Rockefeller, Matisse'south concluding 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.
If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze anybody. "
- Henri Matisse
Legacy
In 1951 Matisse finished a four-year projection of designing the interior, the drinking glass windows and the decorations of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, often referred to as the Matisse Chapel. This project was the event of the close friendship between Matisse and Sis Jacques-Marie. He had hired her every bit a nurse and model in 1941 before she became a Dominican nun and they met again in Vence and started the collaboration, a story related in her 1992 book Henri Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence and in the 2003 documentary "A Model for Matisse".
He established a museum dedicated to his work in 1952, in his birthplace city, and this museum is now the 3rd-largest collection of Matisse works in France.
Matisse died of a middle assault at the age of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Matriarch de Cimiez, near Prissy. Just like William Shakespeare on literature, and Sigmund Freud on psychology, Henri Matisse's impact on Fauvism movement is tremendous. Thanks to the influence he had on painting following the 2nd World War, Henri Matisse's reputation is higher than it has ever been before. Following the principle discussed past Hans Hofmann, that color was responsible for structural configurations behind the picture, was showcased in American abstract art. Works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other color field painters, showcased this style in their pieces. Following this concept, Matisse is an influential effigy of the 20th century, and a decisive figure of the time. By defining a clearly pictorial language, of colors and arabesque lines, rather than looking at painting as a means to an end, Matisse had a great affect on future movements, and works, produced by artists in the 20th century.
Source: https://www.henrimatisse.org/