Henri Matisse was born as the son of a grain merchant in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France where he studied law and worked as a law clerk. In 1889, at the age of 21, while recovering from severe appendicitis, his mother (an amateur painter) bought him an art set. “When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise" he would later describe it. He abandoned his legal career, to the disappointment of his father, and decided to become an artist. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Acadamie Julian where he achieved proficiency in academic painting in the classic reserved style. In 1896, while painting in Brittany, he began to adopt the lighter palette of the Impressionists.
Matisse's true artistic liberation began about 1899 through the influence of Neo-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, whose works used color to render forms and organize spatial planes. Then, in 1903-1904, Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Paul Signac and Henri Edmond Cross. Signac and Cross were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes or dots of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. The resulting technique was known as Pointillism. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader strokes.
At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Matisse and colleagues Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Albert Marquet, exhibited a group of paintings they had recently completed while in the south of France. The intensely vibrant and spontaneously painted works were hung in room seven where they were jeered by the public who deemed them exceedingly primitive, brutal and violent. The artists were dubbed “les fauves” (the wild beasts) by art critic Louis Vauxcelles.
The Fauve artists encouraged viewers to become responsive to the paint, usually applied directly from the tube, as a physical and emotional element of the painting. Brilliant, wide strokes of pure color reinterpreted the shape of objects, skewed the traditional foreground to background depth of field and aroused intense sensations in both the artist and the viewer. Matisse said of his works “When I use green it is not grass, when I use blue it is not sky”.
The American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were early collectors and supporters of Matisse, as well as, American collector Dr. Albert Barnes who would include the artist's works in The Barnes Collection-Foundation outside Philadelphia. The Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin purchased more than forty early Matisse paintings and opened his home to the public one day a week—the only place to see European Modern Art in Moscow. These patrons gave Matisse the financial freedom to travel seeing Germany, Morocco, Russia and Spain before WWI. The artist signed up for military service but was rejected as too old at 44. He spent the war years working infrequently and took comfort in music—playing the violin as an accomplished amateur.
Pablo Picasso, who first saw Matisse paintings at the Stein's apartment, would exchange paintings with the artist in 1907. This was the start of a creative rivalry and association which would last until Matisse’s death in 1954. “No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he” stated Picasso.
After World War I, Matisse had gained a high reputation and was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1925. He was an internationally recognized artist by 1930. In 1940 he settled permanently in the South of France to escape the occupation of Paris living mostly in the Hotel Regina in Nice.
In 1941 Matisse had two major operations for duodenal cancer which had a devastating effect on his health and ability to paint. The surgeries left him unable to stand upright in front of his easel and he was confined to either a bed or a wheelchair. Undaunted by his immobility, he would ask his assistant to tape a piece of charcoal to a long stick and he would draw on mounted paper or directly on the walls or ceilings. The ultimate step in the art of Matisse was taken in his papiers découpés, abstract shapes cut from colored paper, executed in the mid-1940s. “The paper cut out” he said “allows me to draw in the color. It is a simplification for me. Instead of drawing the outline and putting the color inside it—the one modifying the other—I draw straight into the color”. These works rank as some of the most joyous works ever created by an artist at an advanced age and he continued creating paper cutout works until the day of his death.
Henri Matisse died on November 3, 1954 in Nice as an innovative artist who explored color and form through his paintings, lithographs, illustrated books, sculpture and stained glass windows. Pablo Picasso once said about the artist: "All things considered, there is only Matisse".
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