Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French
artist, 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, along with Pablo Picasso
and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists
who helped to define the revolutionary developments
in the plastic arts in the opening decades
of the twentieth century, responsible for
significant developments in painting and sculpture.
Although he was initially labelled a Fauve,
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 drawing, displayed
in a body of work spanning over a half-century,
won him recognition as a leading figure in
modern art.
Early life and education
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 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 disappointing his father. 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.
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 would later say
"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 Beaux-Arts, two of which were
purchased by the state.
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 and Pierre.
Marguerite and Amélie often served as models
for Matisse.
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 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 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.
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
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.
Early paintings
Fauvism
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 were Matisse and
André Derain. Matisse's first solo exhibition
was at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1904,
without much success. His fondness for bright
and expressive colour became more 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 his works
in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme
et Volupté. In 1905 he travelled 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!", 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 newspaper, and passed
into popular usage. The exhibition garnered
harsh criticism—"A pot of 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, Matisse's Woman
with a Hat, was bought by Gertrude and Leo
Stein, the embattled artist's morale improved
considerably.
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 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 criticism, and it was difficult for
him to provide for his family. His painting
Nu bleu was burned in effigy at the Armory
Show in Chicago in 1913.
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 art was
a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated
colour, as in L'Atelier Rouge.
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 is in the collection of
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Selected works: Paris, 1901–1910
Gertrude Stein, Académie Matisse, and the
Cone sisters
Around April 1906 he met Pablo Picasso, who
was 11 years younger than Matisse. The two
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 life, 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.
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.
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."'
Among Pablo 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.
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. Hans Purrmann
and Sarah Stein were amongst several of his
most loyal students.
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.
Selected works: Paris, 1910–1917
After Paris
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.
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. 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.
The war years
He and his wife of 41 years separated in 1939.
In 1941 he underwent surgery in which a colostomy
was performed. Afterwards 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 cut paper
collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches
découpés. His Blue Nudes series feature
prime examples of this technique he called
"painting with scissors"; they demonstrate
the ability to bring his eye for colour and
geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity,
but with playful and delightful power.
In the 1940s he also worked as a graphic artist
and produced black-and-white illustrations
for several books and over one hundred original
lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.
In 1941 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, Matisse sometimes contacted her
to request that she model for him. Bourgeois
became a Dominican nun in 1946.
Matisse was much admired and repeatedly referred
to by the Greek Nobelist poet Odysseas Elytis.
Elytis was introduced to Matisse through their
common friend Tériade, during the work on
the Cutouts. Matisse had painted the wall
of the dining room of Tériade's residence,
the Villa Natacha in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat,
which Elytis also mentioned in his poems.
Matisse, thoroughly unpolitical, was shocked
when he heard that his daughter Marguerite,
who had been active in the Résistance during
the war, was tortured in a Rennes prison and
sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration
camp.
Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in
the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
In 1947 he published Jazz, a limited-edition
artist's book of about one hundred prints
of colourful paper cut collages, accompanied
by his written thoughts. Tériade, a noted
twentieth-century art publisher, arranged
to have Matisse's cutouts rendered as pochoir
prints.
Last years
In 1951 Matisse finished a four-year project
of designing the interior, the glass windows,
and the decorations of the Chapelle du Rosaire
de Vence, often referred to as the Matisse
Chapel. This project was the result of the
close friendship between Matisse and Bourgeois,
now Sister Jacques-Marie, despite him being
an atheist. They had 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".
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.
Matisse died of a heart attack at the age
of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery
of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near
Nice.
Legacy
The first painting of Matisse acquired by
a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums,
exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.
His The Plum Blossoms was purchased on 8 September
2005 for the Museum of Modern Art by Henry
Kravis and the new president of the museum,
Marie-Josée Drouin. Estimated price was US$25 million.
Previously, it had not been seen by the public
since 1970. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture,
Reclining Nude I, sold for US$9.2 million,
a record for a sculpture by the artist.
Matisse's daughter Marguerite often aided
Matisse scholars with insights about his working
methods and his works. She died in 1982 while
compiling a catalogue of her father's work.
Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, opened a modern
art gallery in New York City during the 1930s.
The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which was active
from 1931 until 1989, represented and exhibited
many European artists and a few Americans
and Canadians in New York often for the first
time. He exhibited Joan Miró, Marc Chagall,
Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, André
Derain, Yves Tanguy, Le Corbusier, Paul Delvaux,
Wifredo Lam, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Balthus,
Leonora Carrington, Zao Wou Ki, Sam Francis,
sculptors Theodore Roszak, Raymond Mason,
and Reg Butler, and several other important
artists, including the work of Henri Matisse.
Henri Matisse's grandson, Paul Matisse, is
an artist and inventor living in Massachusetts.
Matisse's great-granddaughter, Sophie Matisse,
is active as an artist. Les Heritiers Matisse
functions as his official Estate. The U.S.
copyright representative for Les Heritiers
Matisse is the Artists Rights Society.
Partial list of works
Portrayal in media and literature
Film dramatisations
A film called "Masterpiece," about the artist
and his relationship with Monique Bourgeois,
was proposed in 2011. Deepa Mehta intended
to direct with Al Pacino to play Henri Matisse.
Matisse was played by Yves-Antoine Spoto in
the 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
Literature
The Ray Bradbury short story "The Watchful
Poker Chip of H. Matisse" contains an allusion
to the artist painting an eye on a poker chip
for an American man to use as a monocle.
Books/essays
Notes of a Painter, 1908
Painter's Notes on Drawing, 1930.
Jazz, 1947
Matisse on Art, collected by Jack D. Flam,
1973. ISBN 0-7148-1518-7
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941
Interview, Getty Publications 2013. ISBN 978-1-60606-128-2
References and sources
References
Sources
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and
His Public New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1951. ISBN 0-87070-469-9; ISBN 978-0-87070-469-7.
Olivier Berggruen and Max Hollein, Editors.
Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors: Masterpieces
from the Late Years. Prestel Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 978-3791334738.
F. Celdran, R.R. Vidal y Plana. Triangle :
Henri Matisse – Georgette Agutte – Marcel
Sembat Paris, Yvelinedition, 2007. ISBN 978-2-84668-131-5.
Jack Cowart and 
Dominique Fourcade. Henri Matisse: The Early
Years in Nice 1916–1930. Henry N. Abrams,
Inc., 1986. ISBN 978-0810914421.
Raymond Escholier. Matisse. A Portrait of
the Artist and the Man. London, Faber & Faber,
1960.
Lawrence Gowing. Matisse. New York, Oxford
University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-520157-4.
Hanne Finsen, Catherine Coquio, et al. Matisse:
A Second Life. Hazan, 2005. ISBN 978-2754100434.
David Lewis. "Matisse and Byzantium, or, Mechanization
Takes Command" in Modernism/modernity 16:1,
51–59.
John Russell. Matisse, Father & Son, published
by Harry N. Abrams, NYC. Copyright John Russell
1999, ISBN 0-8109-4378-6
Pierre Schneider. Matisse. New York, Rizzoli,
1984. ISBN 0-8478-0546-8.
Hilary Spurling. The Unknown Matisse: A Life
of Henri Matisse, Vol. 1, 1869–1908. London,
Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1998. ISBN 0-679-43428-3.
Hilary Spurling. Matisse the Master: A Life
of Henri Matisse, Vol. 2, The Conquest of
Colour 1909–1954. London, Hamish Hamilton
Ltd, 2005. ISBN 0-241-13339-4.
Alastair Wright. Matisse and the Subject of
Modernism Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 2006. ISBN 0-691-11830-2.
Further reading
Nancy Marmer, "Matisse and the Strategy of
Decoration," Artforum, March 1966, pp. 28–33.
External links
Footage of Henri Matisse in Vence, France
working on the New Chapel of Vence
Henri Matisse: Life and Work 500 hi-res images
Henri Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art
Musée Matisse Nice
The nude in Matisse
Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California
Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse,
Picasso and Les Fauves, 1910
