Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, December 31, 1869 - Nice, November 3, 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of color and his fluid and original art of drawing.
He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is primarily known as a painter. Matisse is considered, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, to be one of the three seminal artists of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
Although he was initially labeled a Fauvist (use of pure colors, without mixing with others), in the 1920s he was increasingly acclaimed as a defender of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work over more than half a century, earned him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
Henri Matisse's Biography
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas de Calais region, on December 31, 1869, and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardy region, where his parents owned a seed business. He was the first child of the couple.
The son of a grain merchant who thought artists were nothing but irresponsible bohemians, he encouraged his son to enter law school in Paris in 1887. He went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator at Le Cateau-Cambrésis after obtaining his qualification.
He began painting in 1889, when his mother brought him the necessary materials during a period of convalescence after an attack of appendicitis. In painting, he discovered a kind of "paradise," as he later described it, and decided then to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father.
In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Julian Academy and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially, he painted still lifes and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, in which he obtained reasonable proficiency.
Chardin was one of the painters most admired by Matisse. As an art student, he made four copies of Chardin's paintings at the Louvre. In 1896, he exhibited five paintings in the salon of the National Society of Fine Arts and the state bought two of his paintings. The result allowed contact with Auguste Rodin and Camille Pissarro. In Luxembourg, beginning in 1897, he became interested in Impressionism.
In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on Belle-Isle island off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and showed him the work of Van Gogh (who had been a good friend of Russell's, but was completely unknown at the time). Matisse's style changed completely and he would later say, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me."
Matisse had, in his house, a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by Van Gogh and, most importantly, Three Bathers by Cézanne. In Cézanne's perception of pictorial structure and color, Matisse found his main inspiration.
Many of his paintings between 1899 and 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the painting of J. M. W. Turner and then set out on a trip to Corsica.
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 often served as a model for Matisse.
On a week-long trip to London, he became acquainted with the painting of William Turner, who would also come to influence him, after advice from Camille Pissarro.
He exhibited in 1901 at the Salon des Indépendants and participated for the first time in the Fall Salon in 1903. In an exhibition held in 1904 by Ambroise Vollard, he was not very successful. The following year, together with the group, he exhibited at the Paris Salon.
This time, the group was recognized as the Fauves and Matisse as the leader. Another part of the public was scandalized by the violent and pure colors of his works.
Several trips, which would be inspirational, were made during this period. He visited Algeria, Italy, Germany, Morocco, Russia, the United States, and Tahiti.
From 1904, Matisse worked part of each year in the south in Saint-Tropez and Collioure, and later in Spain and Morocco.
In 1908, he founded the Matisse Academy for a cosmopolitan selection of students and published "Notes of a Painter," which contained his artistic beliefs. The academy was paralyzed in 1911.
Between 1913 and 1917, the phase he considered the most important, his painting was somewhat austere, with straight lines and geometric shapes. Later, his style became looser, female figures and the interior were his main subjects, worked in a free style and with decorative colors.
In 1916 and 1917, he spent the winters in Nice, and then decided to stay on the Côte d'Azur, which he considered a paradise, as depicted in his paintings.
Matisse achieved an international reputation with exhibitions in Moscow, Berlin, Munich, and London.
In 1913, he exhibited in New York alongside Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, as representatives of a precursor of modern art.
In 1919, he received assignments from Igor Stravinski and Serguei Diaguilev to design the costumes and sets for a ballet performed in London.
In 1927, he organized a retrospective in New York. Back in Paris, he worked on the illustration of a novel by James Joyce, Ulysses, to which he gave the colors of the customs of the Russian ballets of Monte Carlo.
In 1941, sick with cancer, he was hospitalized in Lyon, where the doctors gave him six months to live. Unable to travel, he used experiences gathered on his travels to perfect his originality. His nurse, Monique Bourgeois, agreed to be his model. During this period, Matisse invented the technique of "drawing with scissors", when he also implemented the Jazz series.
In Vence, a commune in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, where he lived already ill, he exchanged about 1,200 letters with the French writer André Rouveyre.
In 1945, he had a major retrospective at the Salon d'Autumn, when he made tapestry works inspired by the sky and sea of French Polynesia.
In 1952, he opened a museum in his hometown.
His work The King's Sadness was his last self-portrait.
Henri Matisse was buried in the cemetery of Cimiez in Nice.
Style
Matisse was influenced by the works of Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Edouard Manet, and the post-impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Signac, and also by Auguste Rodin and Japanese art.[source needed]
The movement between painting and sculpture relaxed the artist.
His sculpture was an extension of his painting, his admission to primitive art was more apparent. In some works he explores the solid, structural aspects of the body with a certain exaggeration in order to achieve a clear expression of form.
Although he never joined the Cubists, he suffered some influences from this group.
Matisse, like other artists of the movement, rejected the impressionist luminosity, and used color as the main factor in painting, taking it to its ultimate consequences.
Known and recognized for his vivacity, Matisse's colors continued even after his death, so much so that Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose was valued at 32 million Euros.
Argan said that Matisse's art was made to decorate men's lives. He was considered the artist of the century in which he lived. In his paintings he liked repetitive motifs, used curved shapes and varied colors. He also invented the "scissor drawing" technique.
Matisse started with vibrant colors and then turned to Cézanne, whom he admired for his style.
Matisse thought that artists had to have the eyes of a child, to always look as if for the first time.
According to Régine Pernoud, Matisse "was an artist in the medieval sense of the term. His work was very simple, chosen to express what he himself felt. He was a worker without obstinacy. In his workbooks, several pages have only a few strokes. Finally, these strokes, recognizable by all, show evidently their meaning, the result of many hours of work".
Pablo Picasso considered him his greatest rival, although he was his friend.