Matisse’ gift for colourism, or intense use of colour, was expressed by Picasso, when he said, “After Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only one left who understands colour”. Matisse’ Fauvist works from around 1900 – 1905 brought him fame, not only as a colourist, but as a master. His most famous works came after he moved to Nice where he gained critical acclaim for a newer more relaxed style. In the 1930’s he retreated into a strong simplistic form. Finally, too ill to paint, he produced a large volume of collage art. All in all, he will best be remembered as one of the greatest colourist ever.
Matisse was born in Northern France and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, France. After becoming a lawyer in 1889, while convalescing from an appendicitis, he started painting. In 1891 he went to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. Initially he painted still lifes and landscapes and was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as Impressionists like Édouard Manet, and, as an art student, made copies of four of Chardin’s paintings in the Louvre.
In 1896, after being introduced to the art of Vincent van Gogh via a visit with Australian painter John Russell, he embraced colour in what would come to be known as Fauvism. The same year, Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state.
In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite, a daughter from a previous relationship, together. The couple had two sons together, Jean and Pierre. In 1899, after returning from a trip to England to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner,Matisse immersed himself in the work of others, going into debt with the purchasing of pieces by Rodin, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne. Matisse found his main inspiration in the sense of pictorial structure and colour displayed in In Cézanne’s, “Three Bathers”. He found further inspiration from an essay of Paul Signac, “D’Eugène Delacroix au Neo-impressionism, hence utilizing a Divisionist technique. With his financial challenges, his work took on an obsession with form. This was followed by a devotion to working in clay and Sculpture, creating the piece “The Slave” in 1903.
Fauvism, thrived between 1904 – 1908; it began around 1900 and ended around 1910 with only 3 exhibitions. Matisse’ most important work of this period was in a neo-Impressionist style as having been exemplified by his “Luxe, Calme et Volupté”. After this his paintings were characterized by flat shapes and contrived lines, a weaker form of pointillism.
With the decline of the Fauvism, Matisse made a concerted effort to absorb different styles. He travelled to Algeria in 1906 studying African art and Primitivism, and after attending an exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent two months in Spain studying Moorish art. He visited Morocco spending seven months there from 1912 to 1913, producing about 24 paintings and numerous drawings. Then, while painting in Tangier, he made several changes to his work, including his use of black as a colour. The effect on Matisse’s art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in L’Atelier Rouge
In 1917 Matisse relocated to a suburb of Nice, Cimiez. This seemed to have a laid back work on his work for about 10 years in this, “return to order”. In the late 1920s Matisse collaborated with Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, Spaniards, andAmericans.
In the 1930’s Matisse, in a way, reinvented himself, with a bolder simplification driving his eclectic offerings. Matisse produced a large mural for the Barnes Foundation, “The Dance II”, which was completed in 1932, and “Large Reclining Nude” in 1935. Matisse’s marriage ended in 1939 as a result of an affair with a Russian émigré, Lydia Delectorskaya who remained with Matisse for the rest of his life.
Matisse remained in Nice during World War II. He was allowed to exhibit along with other former Fauves and Cubists, whom Hitler had initially claimed to despise. He also worked as a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over one hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris. In 1941, Matisse underwent an operation to remove cancer. Though it was successful, complications left him bedridden for three months. Matisse hired a nurse, Monique Bourgeois, who became a model and then a Dominican nun. They became friends and Matisse taught her art.
The convalescence from the cancer operation facilitated his collage art period. He created cut paper collages, or decoupage. He would cut sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache, into shapes of varying colours and sizes, and arranged them to form compositions. After moving to the hilltop of Vence in 1943, he produced his artist’s book, “Jazz”. These cut-outs were designed as stencil prints to be looked at in the book, rather than as independent pictorial works. After Jazz, came the larger cut-out works, such as “Oceania the Sky” and “Oceania the Sea” 1946.
In 1948 to honour Bourgeois, his nurse/armature artist /Dominican nun friend, Matisse prepared designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. All the applications, the chapel windows, chasubles, and tabernacle door, were designed through the cut out method. Matisse’ final sculpture was in 1950 and his last painting in 1951. Matisse was then to stay faithful collage art as his only form of expression through to his death.
In 1952 he established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, and this museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France. Matisse’s final work was the design for a stained-glass window installed at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills near the Rockefeller estate north of New York City.
Matisse suffered a heart attack on 3 November 1954 and died at the age of 84.
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