A Contemplative Look at Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, leader of the Fauve group, regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, and a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambresis in northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of a middle-class family, he studied and began to practice law. In 1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of appendicitis, he became intrigued by the practice of painting. Unlike so many great art masters, Matisse did not begin painting as a young prodigious artist. At first, Matisse's father had intended for his son to become a lawyer. His sensitive health throughout childhood made it impossible for Matisse to consider an industrial career. Both of his parents influenced Matisse's life greatly. He acquired artistic taste from his mother, herself somewhat of an artist, who often spent much of her time working on ceramics to decorate their home. Her talented artistic ability and her support of his art, influenced Henri Matisse in his decisions to pursue art as a career. His father on the other hand was more of the average hard working class. He was a local grain merchant. Matisse's father perhaps played a less infl
Another difference between these works and some of his earlier ones is the sense of time. While in previous images, there was a sense of continuity in time, and passage of such, in these everything happened at once, and there was more of a discontinuity. Toward the end of his life, Matisse realized that this was the style he had been searching for. He gave new form to his older paintings. In "Amphitrite" of 1947, he brings back some of his older mythological ideas, and in "Christmas Eve," he reverts to his later, floral and rythmic patterns. One can believe that the style that Matisse finally settled upon was the one that he was meant for, because as he had said earlier in his life he had, "an unconscious belief in a future life...some paradise where I shall paint frescoes..." uential role, but never the less, a significant one. He was stricter and more disciplinary, but for the most part he also supported his son during times of financial and emotional hardship. In 1892, having given up his law career, he went to Paris to study art formally. His first teachers were academically trained and relatively conservative; Matisse's own early style was a conventional form of naturalism, and he made many copies after the old masters. . He joined Gustave Moreau's studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he met Camoin, Manguin, Marquet and Jean Puy. Matisse experimented with several mediums and styles. He also studied more contemporary art, especially that of the impressionists, and he began to experiment, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio classes. Matisse's true artistic liberation, in terms of the use of color to render forms and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of the French painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne and the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. Then, in 1903 and 1904, Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac. Cross and Signac were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes (often dots or "points") of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader strokes. Matisse became Neo-Impressionistic, using both colors and shapes boldly. His later work emphasized the saturation of color and a simplicity of lines. In several works, he exhibits a plasticity of forms that complements his simplistic and saturated use of color. In some of his paintings, he transposed patterns which diminished the sense of space in his work. By 1905 he had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, including a striking picture of his wife, "Green Stripe." The title refers to a broad stroke of brilliant green that defines Madame Matisse's brow and nose. In the same year Matisse exhibited this and similar paintings along with works by his artist companions, including Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together, the group was dubbed Les Fauves (literally, "the wild beasts") because of the extremes of emotionalism in which they seemed to have indulged, their use of vivid colors, and their distortion of shapes. From the 1920s until
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