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Henri Emile-Benoit Matisse
(Dec.31, 1869 Le Cateau, Fr.- Nov.3, 1954 Nice) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Henri Matisse was born the son of a middle-class family, he studied and began to practice law. In 1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of appendicitis, he became intrigued by the practice of oil painting. In 1892, having given up his law career, he went to Paris to study art formally. The long years of learning followed, in 1891 Matisse studied under Adolphe William Bouguereau at the Académie Julian and in 1892 transferred unofficially to Gustave Moreau’s art studio at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, at the same time attending the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. Matisse's own early style was a conventional form of naturalism and he made many oil painting reproductions of the old masters. In 1894 his daughter was born, followed by two sons. Financial difficulties made him stay for some time with his parents.
His use of color to render forms and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of the French painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne and the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh, whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. Then in 1903, Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Paul Signac. Signac was experimenting with strokes of dots of pure paint to create the strongest visual vibrations of intense color. Matisse adopted this technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader strokes. By 1905 he had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, including a striking picture of his wife, Green Stripe (Madame Matisse) (1905, Statens Museum Kunst, Copenhagen).
While he was regarded as a leader of radicalism in the arts, Matisse was beginning to gain the approval of a number of influential critics and art collectors, including the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and her family. Among the many important commissions he received was that of a Russian art collector who requested mural panels illustrating dance and music. The Dance and The Music (1911, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). Such broadly conceived themes ideally suited Matisse, they allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Although intellectually sophisticated, Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form, instead colors, shapes and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design and he explained the rhythmic but distorted, forms of many of his figures in terms of the working out of a total pictorial harmony.
From the 1920s until his death, Matisse spent much time in the south of France, particularly Nice, oil painting local scenes with a thin, fluid application of bright color. In his old age, he was commissioned to design the decoration of the small Chapel of Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence, near Cannes, which he completed between 1947 and 1951. Often bedridden during his last years, Matisse died in Nice. Unlike many artists, he was internationally popular during his lifetime, enjoying the favor of art collectors, art critics and the younger generation of artists.
Matisse's work reflects a number of influences, the decorative quality of Near Eastern art, the stylized forms of the masks and sculpture of African, the bright colors of the French Impressionists and the simplified forms of French artist Paul Cezanne and the cubists. The art of the 20th century has been dominated by two men, one of which is Henri Matisse. He was an artists of classical greatness and his visionary forays into new art have changed our understanding of the world and made him one of the worlds artists.
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Green Stripe (Madame Matisse)
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The Dance
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The Music
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Le bonheur de vivre, The Joy of Life
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Woman in a Purple Coat
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