Henri Matisse - Master of Impressionist Art

“What I dream of is an art of balance, purity, and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter... a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” - Henri Matisse Henri Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambresis, Nord, France. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardy, France, where his parents owned a flower business; he was their first son. In 1887, he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He began painting first 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. In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially, he painted still-lives and landscapes in a traditional style proficiently. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau and Edouard Manet. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters; as an art student, he made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre. He emerged as a Post-Impressionist and achieved prominence as the leader of the French movement, `Fauvism’. He preferred to use color as the foundation for expressive and decorative paintings. He became famous for his original use of colour. He had skills as a draughtsman and a printmaker. He went on also to become a sculptor but was known essentially as a painter. He defined revolutionary developments in the visual arts during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century along with Pablo Picasso. The intense colour patterns of his paintwork between 1900 and 1905 brought him recognition as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the years after 1906 when he projected a meticulous style that stressed on decorative forms. When ill health in his last years prevented him from painting, he created an important style through the medium of cut paper collage. Matisse’s mastery of the expressive medium of colour displayed in a body of work that spanned over a half-century won him recognition as a leading figure in the modern art and impressionist scene. Matisse is regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Matisse has been hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting during the Impressionist era. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing won him acclaim as a leading figure in modern art. Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionism technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac's essay, "Eugene Delacroix and Néoimpressionism". He made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899. After that, he devoted much of his energy to working with clay, completing `The Slave’ in 1903. His 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 and Calme et Volupté. His paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines and he used pointillism in a less rigid way than before. In 1905, Matisse exhibited in a room at the Salon d'Automne. The paintings expressed emotion with wild and dissonant colours. Matisse showed `Open Window’ and `Woman with the Hat’ at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the phrase, "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" meaning (`Donatello among the wild beasts’). His comment was printed on 17th October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper and passed into popular usage. The exhibition, however, attracted harsh criticism with phrases such as "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille Mauclair. When his painting that was singled out for biased condemnation, `Woman with a Hat’ got eventually bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, his morale improved significantly. Matisse maintained 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’ in 1910. These paintings are found in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-four in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez near Nice. Henri Matisse's impact on Fauvism movement is considerable. Thanks to the influence he had on paintings following the Second World War, Henri Matisse's reputation is higher than it has ever been before. Following the principle discussed by Hans Hofmann that color was responsible for structural configurations behind a picture, abstract works of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock showcased this style in their pieces. Matisse became an influential figure of the twentieth century and a decisive figure in the world of Impressionist Art of the time. By defining a visible pictorial language of colours and arabesque lines, Matisse had a huge impact on future and works produced by artists in the twentieth century. “If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.” - Henri Matisse