Matisse (Greek Band)

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual 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.

Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.

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 on New Year's Eve in 1869, the oldest son of a wealthy grain merchant. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie. 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.Bärbel Küster. "Arbeiten und auf niemanden hören." ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'', 6 July 2007.

In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts under 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, Matisse, an unknown art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island of Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Vincent van Gogh—who had been a friend of Russell—and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse's style changed completely: abandoning his earth-coloured palette for bright colours. He later said Russell was his teacher, and that Russell had explained colour theory to him. The same year, 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 (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). 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.Oxford Art Online, "Henri Matisse" Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy,Leymarie, Jean; Read, Herbert; Lieberman, William S. (1966), ''Henri Matisse'', UCLA Art Council, p.10. 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, "".

In May 1902, Amélie's parents became ensnared in a major financial scandal, the Humbert Affair. Her mother (who was the Humbert family's housekeeper) and father became scapegoats in the scandal, and her family was menaced by angry mobs of fraud victims.Spurling, Hilary, 2005, "Matisse's Pajamas", ''The New York Review of Books'', 11 August 2005, pp. 33–36. According to art historian Hilary Spurling, "their public exposure, followed by the arrest of his father-in-law, left Matisse as the sole breadwinner for an extended family of seven". During 1902 to 1903, Matisse adopted a style of painting that was comparatively somber and concerned with form, a change possibly intended to produce saleable works during this time of material hardship. 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.
File:Matisse the study of moreau.jpg, ''Gustave Moreau's Studio'', 1894–1895
File:Matisse - Blue Pot and Lemon (1897).jpg, ''Blue Pot and Lemon'' (1897), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Matisse Mur Rose.jpg, ''Le Mur Rose'', 1898, Jewish Museum Frankfurt
File:Matisse - Vase of Sunflowers (1898).jpg, ''Vase of Sunflowers'' (1898), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Study of a nude by Matisse.jpg, ''Study of a Nude'', 1899, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo
File:Henri Matisse, 1899, Still Life with Compote, Apples and Oranges, oil on canvas, 46.4 x 55.6 cm, The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art.jpg, ''Still Life with Compote, Apples and Oranges,'' 1899, The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

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.John Elderfield, The ''"Wild Beasts" Fauvism and Its Affinities,'' 1976, Museum of Modern Art, p.13, 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 '' The Open Window'' and '' Woman with a Hat'' at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on a lone sculpture surrounded by an "orgy of pure tones" as "Donatello chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts),Vauxcelles, Louis

Gil Blas, Supplément à Gil Blas du 17 octobre 1905, p.8, col.1, Salle VII (end). Retrieved from France Gallica, bibliothèque numérique (digital library), Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1 December 2013. referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.Chilver, Ian (Ed.)
"Fauvism"
, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved from enotes.com, 26 December 2007. 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 the 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 (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 criticism, and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His painting '' Nu bleu'' (1907) 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 Tangier 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'' (1911).

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 (1901–1910)

File:Matisse - Luxembourg Gardens (1901).jpg, ''Luxembourg Gardens'', 1901, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Matisse - Dishes and Fruit (1901).jpg, ''Dishes and Fruit'', 1901, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Henri Matisse, 1902, Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 72.4 x 54.6 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery.jpg, '' A Glimpse of Notre-Dame in the Late Afternoon'', 1902, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
File:Matisse-Luxe.jpg, '' Luxe, Calme et Volupté'', 1904, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
File:Matisse-Open-Window.jpg, '' Open Window, Collioure'', 1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
File:Matisse - Green Line.jpeg, '' Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line),'' 1905, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
File:Bonheur Matisse.jpg, ''Le bonheur de vivre'', 1905–6, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
File:Henri Matisse Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt (1906).jpg, '' Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt'', 1906, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
File:Young Sailor II.jpg, '' The Young Sailor II,'' 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
File:Matisse - Vase, Bottle and Fruit (1906).jpg, ''Vase, Bottle and Fruit'', 1906, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Matisse Souvenir de Biskra.jpg, '' Blue Nude'', 1907, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
File:Matisse.mme-matisse-madras.jpg, '' Madras Rouge'', ''The Red Turban'', 1907, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
(Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show)
File:Bathers with a turtle.jpg, ''Bathers with a Turtle'', 1908, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis
File:Matisse - Game of Bowls.jpg, ''Game of Bowls,'' 1908, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Henri Matisse, 1909, La danse (I), Museum of Modern Art.jpg, '' La Danse (first version),'' 1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
File:Matissedance.jpg, '' La Danse (second version),'' 1910, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Sculpture

File:Henri Matisse, 1900-1904, Le Serf (The Serf, Der Sklave), bronze.jpg, ''Le Serf'' (''The Serf, Der Sklave''), 1900–1904, bronze
File:Henri Matisse, 1905, Sleep, wood, exhibition Blue Rose (Голубая Роза), 1907, location unknown.jpg, ''Sleep'', 1905, wood, exhibition Blue Rose (Голубая Роза), 1907, location unknown
File:Henri Matisse, 1906-07, Nu couché, I (Reclining Nude, I), exhibited at Montross Gallery, New York, 1915.jpg, ''Nu couché, I'' (''Reclining Nude, I''), 1906–07, bronze, exhibited at Montross Gallery, New York, 1915
File:Henri Matisse, 1908, Figure décorative, bronze.jpg, ''Figure décorative'', 1908, bronze
File:Matisse - left to right 'The Back I', 1908-09, 'The Back II', 1913, 'The Back III' 1916, 'The Back IV', c. 1931, bronze, Museum of Modern Art (New York City).jpg, '' 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

Gertrude Stein, Académie Matisse, and the Cone sisters

Around April 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years his junior.The Unknown Matisse, pp 352–553...
ABC Radio National, 8 June 2005 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 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 with her partner 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 ..Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance".

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.

His friends organized 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.

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. Goldfish in aquariums also became a frequently recurring theme in Matisse's art following his trip to Morocco.

Selected works (1910–1917)

File:Matisse518.jpg, '' Still Life with Geraniums,'' 1910, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
File:Atelier rouge matisse 1.jpg, ''L'Atelier Rouge'', 1911, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
File:Matisse Conversation.jpg, ''The Conversation,'' , The Hermitage Museum, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Henri Matisse, 1911-12, La Fenêtre à Tanger (Paysage vu d'une fenêtre Landscape viewed from a window, Tangiers), oil on canvas, 115 x 80 cm, Pushkin Museum.jpg, ''Window at Tangier,'' 1911–12, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
File:Goldfish Matisse.jpg, ''Goldfish (Matisse), Goldfish'', 1912, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
File:Matisse Riffian.jpg, ''Le Rifain assis'', 1912–13, 200 × 160 cm. Barnes Foundation
File:Henri Matisse, 1913, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, oil on canvas, 146 x 97.7 cm, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.jpg, ''Portrait of the Artist's Wife'', 1913, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
File:Henri Matisse, 1913, La glace sans tain (The Blue Window), oil on canvas, 130.8 x 90.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art.jpg, ''La glace sans tain'' (''The Blue Window''), 1913, Museum of Modern Art
File:Matisse Woman on a high stool.jpg, ''Woman on a High Stool,'' 1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
File:Henri Matisse - View of Notre Dame. Paris, quai Saint-Michel, spring 1914.jpg, ''View of Notre-Dame,'' 1914, Museum of Modern Art
File:Porte-Fenetre a Collioure 1914.jpg, ''French Window at Collioure'', 1914. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
File:Yellow Curtain.jpg, ''Le rideau jaune, The Yellow Curtain,'' 1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York
File:Studio, Quad Saint Michel.jpeg, ''Studio, Quad Saint Michel'', 1916, The Phillips Collection
File:Henri Matisse, 1916-17, Auguste Pellerin II, oil on canvas, 150.2 x 96.2 cm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.jpg, ''Auguste Pellerin II'', 1916–17, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
File:Henri Matisse, 1916-17, Le Peintre dans son atelier (The Painter and His Model), oil on canvas, 146.5 x 97 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.jpg, ''The Painter and His Model (Le Peintre dans son atelier)'', 1916–17, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
File:Henri Matisse, 1917, Portrait de famille (The Music Lesson), oil on canvas, 245.1 x 210.8 cm, Barnes Foundation.jpg, ''Portrait de famille (The Music Lesson)'', 1917, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 210.8 cm, Barnes Foundation

After Paris

In 1917, Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice

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