Henri Matisse: The Complete Story
Henri Matisse was the French master of color who led the Fauves, spent a lifetime as Picasso's friendly rival, and reinvented his own art at the very end, cutting shapes from painted paper with scissors when he could no longer stand. More than any painter of the twentieth century, he made joy itself his subject.
He wanted his pictures to calm you down, not shake you up. That sounds simple. It took him fifty years of work to get there.
The wild beast who painted calm
At the 1905 Salon d'Automne, Matisse and his friends hung paintings of raw, unmixed color that looked almost violent to Paris eyes. A critic sneered that they were fauves, wild beasts. The insult stuck, named the movement, and made Matisse its leader overnight. His Woman with a Hat, a portrait of his wife in slabs of green and purple, was the scandal of the show.
Color as the whole point
Matisse cut color loose from description. A face could be green, a shadow could be pink, if that is what the picture needed to feel right. He once said he dreamed of an art as restful as a good armchair for a tired mind. You can see that calm in Goldfish, in the flat red of The Red Studio, and in the dancers who circle across his canvases.
Matisse and Picasso, the great duel
For half a century Matisse and Pablo Picasso circled each other, half rivals, half friends. They traded paintings, studied each other, and pushed one another forward. They were the two poles of modern art: Matisse the colorist who soothed, Picasso the form breaker who attacked. When Matisse died, Picasso said there was no one left to talk to about painting.
A late painter who started over with scissors
Around 1941, surgery for cancer left Matisse bedridden. Instead of stopping, he invented a new art. He had assistants paint sheets of paper in pure color, then cut shapes straight out of them with scissors and pinned them into glowing compositions. He called it drawing with scissors. The book Jazz, the famous Blue Nudes and The Snail all came from this final burst. His handling of the nude had become pure shape and color.
The bright years grew from dark ones
The joyful cut outs came out of a grim time. Matisse spent the Second World War in the south of France, too ill to flee, while his estranged wife and his daughter Marguerite worked for the Resistance. Marguerite was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and barely survived. Out of those years of fear and sickness came some of the most life affirming images he ever made, color cut clean from the page. The calm in his art was a decision, not an accident.
The chapel he called his masterpiece
Between 1948 and 1951, from a wheelchair, Matisse designed the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence down to the last detail: the stained glass, the wall tiles, even the priests' robes. A man not known for religion called this small chapel the masterpiece of his entire life.
Where he sits in modern art
Matisse came out of Post-Impressionism and an early flirtation with pointillism, then blew the door open with Fauvism, the first great shock of the new century. Cubism and abstraction walked through the door he opened.
The works to know
A few works carry his fame: The Dance, Woman with a Hat, The Red Studio, Goldfish, the cut paper Blue Nudes, and the book Jazz. Each one is a lesson in how far color alone can carry a picture.
Quick answers about Henri Matisse
Who was Henri Matisse? The French painter who led Fauvism and reshaped modern color.
When was he born? In Le Cateau Cambresis, in 1869.
How did he die? In Nice, in 1954, at the age of 84.
What is he known for? Bright color, Fauvism, and the late cut outs.
What are the cut outs? Shapes cut from painted paper with scissors, his final great body of work.
What movement did he belong to? Fauvism, which he founded.
Where can I see his work? MoMA in New York, the Matisse Museum in Nice, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
He finished the Vence chapel from a wheelchair, too weak to stand at an easel, and called that tiny building the masterpiece of his whole life. The man who spent decades painting joy ended on a note of pure calm.