Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
1869-1954
Henri Matisse, born in 1869, was the French painter whose unique understanding of colour and forms forcefully reshaped the contemporary artistic landscape. From 1905 he became the leader of the Fauvist movement with his dynamic, clashing colours and fluid, liberated forms fascinating viewers. A leading 20th century avant-garde painter, Matisse’s chromatically violent yet peaceful and serene works developed a new visual language which anticipated later abstract experimentations. In the final years of his career Matisse kept advancing his search for the unity of line and colour through innovative paper cut-outs and continued to create art until his death in 1954.
Born in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis into a family of weavers, Henri Matisse was the French painter who most forcefully brought visual art into the 20th century through a unique use of colour and fluid, simplified forms. Decorative patterns, flattened shapes and liberated motions are accompanied in Matisse’s art by the intense colourism that is now considered his signature element.
Having moved to Paris in 1891 to become an artist, Matisse first enrolled into the Académie Julian. Unsatisfied with the school’s traditional values, he soon left to join the more experimental École des Arts Décoratifs and the atelier of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. This period of studies culminated in 1896 when Matisse exhibited four paintings at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Now more comfortable with the intellectual world of the Parisian avant-garde, he started taking the first steps towards stylistic liberation, studying Post-Impressionism and Pointillism.
A crucial development for Matisse’s practice occurred in the summer of 1905 when, inspired by the luminous landscapes of the South of France, he started incorporating dynamic, clashing swathes of colours into his canvases. Fauvism, the first radical movement of twentieth-century art, was born. These works, characterised by strident chromatic juxtapositions and unrestrained brushwork, opened the way to Matisse’s quest for a new way of painting, one that constructed space through coloured surfaces. Brazenly unrealistic and close to the concurrent German Expressionism, these canvases freely mould colours, transforming them into tactile revelations productive of embodied physical responses.
In the years leading up to World War I, Matisse attempted to instil a more rational sense into his canvases, seeking order within the chaotic juxtapositions of bright colours. Works such as ‘Joy of Life’ (1906) and ‘The Red Studio’ (1911) demonstrate a new linear quality and a serene chromatic balance. In the former, voluptuous naked bodies are depicted dancing, playing or embracing each other on a luminous field of grass. Inundated by light, human and natural forms convey a sense of complete harmony, exemplified by the perfect tonal balance of yellows, greens and oranges. In the latter, such serene quality is enlivened by the blinding, flat red surface that is seamlessly transfigured from floor into walls and even furniture.
By the early 1920s, now middle-aged and economically affluent, Matisse’s canvases became less loud, moving toward a sort of subdued classicism that was probably a response to the horrors of World War I. Forms are simplified and constructed through thick contours, colours remaining bright yet meticulously distributed, and space becoming flat, devoid of perspective and foreshortening.
Prevented from painting by ill health, in the last decades of his career Matisse experimented with new media, producing stained glass designs, etchings and lithographs. In the late 1940s he began creating his celebrated paper cut-outs, which constitute the culmination of Matisse’s lifelong search for the unity of line and colour. He continued to produce works until his death in 1954, maintaining his trademark brightness and energy, and betraying no sense of sadness, pain or frustration.
Matisse’s constantly evolving visual language conveys his continued quest for essential forms and expressive colours, which uniquely combine in his paintings and graphic works. His serene yet arresting images, in which lines and shades combine in seemingly effortless compositions, eloquently convey an unrestrained sense of freedom, vitality and joy.
JAZZ
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse’s series ‘Jazz’, started in 1941 and published as a book of stencil plates in 1947 by the art editor Tériade, constitutes a fundamental innovation within the artist’s practice. Experimental and improvisational like the music genre from which their title is borrowed, these illustrations mostly depict scenes inspired by circus performances, music halls and theatres rather than jazz music itself. Reflecting the spontaneous invention of complex musical structures of jazz improvisation, these lively works are a combination of personal memories, fantasies and impressions.
The ‘Jazz’ images were originally produced as paper cut-outs, a technique which allowed Matisse to simplify forms and construct surfaces through pure colours. ‘Instead of drawing the contour and filling in the colour — one modifying the other — I draw directly into the colour, which is all the more controlled in that it is not transposed’, stated the artist. With bright, intense colours and simplified yet dynamic shapes, these works convey an unparalleled sense of animation and movement. Some images, like those of carriages and dancers, are directly borrowed from theatrical performances, while others, displaying abstract forms and geometrical shapes, stem directly from the artist’s imagination.
The ‘Jazz’ series became iconic of Matisse’s later years and not simply because its multi-media nature offered infinite opportunities for technical developments. The ‘Jazz’ images, essential yet sophisticated, constitute charming, emotional visions of the rhythms of modern life.
PAPER CUT-OUTS
Henri Matisse
In the years leading to World War II, Henri Matisse, now in his late sixties, suffered from stomach cancer which left him largely bedridden. Forced to abandon painting but animated by an unstoppable will to keep producing art, he began to experiment with painted paper, cutting it with scissors and juxtaposing it to create sketches and drafts. Eventually, Matisse came to see these cut-outs as artworks in their own right, constituting a new artistic medium which allowed him to ‘draw directly into the colour’.
The cut-outs, displaying a vast array of images including flowers, dancers, circus performers and snails, were immediately praised for their bold and exuberant visuality. Immediate yet sophisticated, these works engaged viewers with their chromatic vibrancy and formal simplicity. Art critics and scholars recognised at once the expressive potential of Matisse’s paper cut-outs, constituting the last step of his quest for stylistic liberation.
These works represent the culmination of Matisse’s lifelong search for a perfect union of line and colour, and dominated the artist’s last 15 years of creative activity. Sought by collectors and galleries, they have been the subject of a blockbuster exhibition in 2014 at London’s Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
BLUE NUDES
Henri Matisse
‘Blue Nudes’ is a small yet widely disseminated series of four lithographs made by Henri Matisse in 1952. The original designs, created through the artist’s signature cut-out technique, exemplify Matisse’s late creative developments in which line and colour fuse to produce dynamic, vibrant compositions.
This series depicts simplified female bodies, entirely composed of blue surfaces, their intertwined limbs stretching to cover the near totality of the paper’s surface. For these works Matisse replicated the serene poses of the figures from his masterpiece ‘The Joy of Life’ (1905), as well as taking inspiration from the many nudes produced in the decades that followed. Yet, these prints constitute perhaps the ultimate permutation of the artist’s creative practice. Despite the flatness of their medium, these bodies appear tangible and sculptural, almost relief-like. The sense of volume is heightened by his use of blue, which for Matisse symbolised distance and space.
After Matisse’s death in 1954, the ‘Blue Nudes’ were reprinted in several editions and have been displayed in numerous international exhibitions to this day. They represent, for critics and collectors, the culmination of Matisse’s attempt to seek ‘an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter’.
ODALISQUES
Henri Matisse
Between the 1920s and 1930s Henri Matisse, whose bold, voluptuous artistic style was by then known and loved by critics and collectors, produced a series of canvases known as ‘Odalisques’. The vibrant sensuality of these works reflects the luminous landscape of Nice, the city in Southern France where they were completed.
Reclined on luxurious beds, surrounded by rich textiles and colourful patterns, the subjects of this series are orientalist fantasies of an imaginary East, full of erotic suggestions and exotic atmosphere. The curvaceous, sculptural female bodies of the ‘Odalisques’ paintings tend to occupy the central sections of the canvases, yet the viewer’s gaze fixates on the abundance of mesmerising decorative patterns that surround them. Replicating in flat, bright colours the rugs, tapestries and wallpapers he had seen in Morocco, Matisse transformed this series into a celebration of chromatic experimentation.
The ‘Odalisques’ canvases remain appreciated and sought by collectors and art institutions worldwide, particularly for their formal similarities with Picasso’s compositions, such as the famed ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907). The ‘Odalisques’ are often showcased in international exhibitions, the most recent of which was at the Norton Simon Museum in California in 2019.
