Produced in conjunction with Matisse as Printmaker: Works from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, an exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
Henri Matisse
(b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis—d. 1954, Nice)
Born in a small French town about a hundred miles north of Paris, Henri Matisse grew up in the neighboring village of Bohain-en-Vermandois, where his father owned a grain business. After earning a law degree in Paris at the age of twenty, he worked as a law-office clerk in the town of Saint-Quentin, attending drawing classes at the Ecole Quentin de La Tour in the mornings before going to work. Two years later, with the reluctant permission of his father, he returned to Paris to attend painting classes at the Académie Julian. He first studied painting with the academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau and then joined the studio of the renowned symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. When Moreau passed away in 1898, Matisse transferred to the studio of another recognized symbolist painter, Eugène Carrière.
In Paris at the turn of the century, the traditional, academic style of neo-classicism was gradually being replaced by the socially conscious realist style and the more intuitive movements of symbolism and impressionism, all of which helped shape the development of Matisse’s own creative methods. While under the tutelage of Bouguereau and Moreau, Matisse trained by copying master works at the Louvre. From Moreau, he learned about the potential of art as a means of expressing personal ideas and emotions rather than as a straightforward representation of reality. Influenced by the older painters Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Matisse purchased small works by these important artists for inspiration. In 1897, he completed his first important painting, The Dinner Table, a work that reflects his efforts to reconcile the fleeting visual character of impressionism with the geometric balance characteristic of Cézanne’s work. Matisse also began to study the work of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and produced his own works in bronze. Although he is best known as a painter and sculptor, Matisse, throughout his career, also created hundreds of finished drawings and prints, using various printmaking techniques. Choosing each medium for its unique capabilities, he placed no hierarchy on the mediums in which he worked.
During the summer of 1904, Matisse went to Saint-Tropez in the south of France to visit the painter Paul Signac (1863–1935). While there, he learned about the technique of pointillism (making an image using small dots of complementary colors) from Signac and the artist Henri-Edmond Cross. He also completed his well-known work Luxe, Calm et Volupté (1904–05), in which he uses pointillism, abstract forms, and vivid colors to reinvigorate the tradition of landscape painting. The next summer, Matisse traveled with his friend André Derain to the small village of Collioure in the south of France, and during this trip, they developed the style later known as Fauvism. Upon their return to Paris in the fall, Matisse and Derain debuted their Fauvist paintings at the Salon d’Automne, whereupon the art critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the artists “fauves” (wild beasts) because of their unconventional use of bold color. Among the best-known of Matisse’s paintings from the Fauve period are The Joy of Life (1905), Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Line) (1905), Woman with a Hat (1905), Open Window, Collioure (1905), Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907), and Luxe I and Luxe II (1907).
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Image: Henri Matisse, Self-portrait, 1923. Crayon lithograph, 12 13/16 x 10 1/16 in (image). Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation (1736 - 110007). © 2009 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
