Henri Matisse

Northern France

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the industrial north of France, and grew up at Bohain-en-Vermandois. His father ran a seed and hardware business; his mother painted china.

The region made silk and wool and was known for weaving. Matisse grew up surrounded by pattern and dyed cloth, and textiles run through his painting for sixty years: the wallpapers, carpets, screens and hangings that fill his interiors come out of that childhood.

He was sent to Paris to study law, passed his examinations in 1888, and came home to work as a clerk in a solicitor's office in Saint-Quentin, copying documents.

The box of paints

In 1889 Matisse had appendicitis and spent a long convalescence in bed. His mother bought him a box of paints to occupy him.

He said afterwards that from the moment he had that box in his hands he knew this was his life, and that painting was the only thing he had ever found that made him feel completely free.

His father was against it. Matisse went to Paris anyway in 1891, at twenty-one, and enrolled at the Académie Julian to prepare for the École des Beaux-Arts. He worked briefly under the academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, failed the entrance examination in 1892, and entered instead the studio of Gustave Moreau, who sent his students to copy in the Louvre and let them paint as they liked.

From 1895 he lived and worked at 19 quai Saint-Michel, with the Seine and Notre-Dame outside the window. He painted the view repeatedly over the next twenty years.

Finding colour

Through the 1890s Matisse painted dark, careful still lifes and interiors in the Dutch manner. The change came from looking at other painters: the Impressionists, then Cézanne, then Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose flat bright colour showed him that paint could carry a picture without describing how things look.

He bought a small Cézanne bathers picture in 1899, when he could not afford it, and kept it for thirty-seven years, calling it the thing that sustained him.

In 1904 he spent the summer at Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and painted in the divided dots of Neo-Impressionism. The following summer, at Collioure on the Mediterranean coast with André Derain, he abandoned the system and simply used colour at full strength.

Fauvism

At the Salon d'Automne in Paris in October 1905, Matisse, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others hung their new paintings in one room, with a conventional Renaissance-style bust by the sculptor Albert Marque standing in the middle of it. Reviewing the show in Gil Blas on 17 October, the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote that it was like a Donatello among wild beasts — Donatello parmi les fauves.[2]

The name stuck. Fauvism lasted about three years as a movement and changed painting permanently: colour freed from description, used for its own force, with drawing reduced to a few strong lines.

Matisse's Woman with a Hat, shown at the same Salon, was the picture people came to jeer at.[3] It is a portrait of his wife Amélie, her face striped with green and mauve.[3] Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, newly installed at 27 rue de Fleurus, bought it, which gave Matisse both money and a position at the centre of the most important private collection of modern art in Europe. The painting is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Picasso

Matisse met Pablo Picasso in 1906 at the Steins' apartment on the rue de Fleurus. Picasso was twelve years younger and newly arrived from Barcelona, and their rivalry ran for fifty years.

They watched each other constantly, bought and exchanged each other's pictures, and pushed each other. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 was in part an answer to Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre; Matisse's flattened, decorated interiors were an answer back.

Matisse said late in life that no one had ever looked at his painting as carefully as Picasso, and that no one had looked at Picasso's as carefully as he had. When Matisse died, Picasso said there was nobody left to talk to.

The Russian collectors

From 1908 the Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin began buying Matisse in quantity, and commissioned two enormous panels, Dance and Music, for the staircase of his Moscow house.

Dance, painted in 1909 and 1910, is five figures holding hands in a ring, in three colours: red bodies, blue sky, green ground. It is one of the most reproduced paintings of the century and it caused a scandal when it was shown in Paris.

Shchukin and another Russian collector, Ivan Morozov, bought so much of his work that by 1914 the largest Matisse collections in the world were in Moscow. They were nationalised after the Revolution and are now in the Hermitage and the Pushkin.

Nice

From 1917 Matisse spent most of each year at Nice, on the Mediterranean, and stayed for the rest of his life.

The Nice paintings of the 1920s show women in patterned rooms, striped awnings, open shutters and light off the sea. Critics accused him of retreating into decoration, and the charge followed him.

He had already given his answer, in an essay of 1908: he wanted an art of balance and calm, something like a good armchair for a tired man. He regretted the phrase. Critics used it against him for forty years to argue that he was not serious.

The war years

When France fell in June 1940 Matisse was in the south-west, near Bordeaux, holding a passage to Brazil. He did not use it, saying that if everyone with anything to offer left, nothing would be left of France, and he returned to Nice.

He had surgery for intestinal cancer in 1941 and was not expected to survive. He did, and called the years afterwards his second life.

His wife Amélie and his daughter Marguerite worked for the Resistance. Both were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944; Amélie was imprisoned and Marguerite was tortured and put on a train to Ravensbrück, escaping when the train was stopped by an air raid. Matisse learned of all this only afterwards.

The cut-outs

The 1941 surgery left Matisse unable to stand for long or to paint at an easel. Instead of stopping he changed medium.

He had assistants paint large sheets of paper with gouache in flat colour, and then cut shapes directly out of them with scissors — a technique he described as drawing with scissors, or as cutting straight into colour. Assistants pinned the shapes to the walls, and he moved them by directing from a wheelchair or bed until the arrangement was right.

The results include the book Jazz in 1947, The Snail, Blue Nude II, and the enormous Swimming Pool that ran around a whole room of his apartment. What began as a workaround for illness turned into the most influential work of his last decade.

The chapel at Vence

Between 1948 and 1951 Matisse designed and decorated the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, near Nice: the stained glass, the black line drawings on white tiles, the priests' vestments, the crucifix, the candlesticks and the doors.

He was not a believer. He took the commission because Monique Bourgeois, who had nursed him after the 1941 operation, later became a Dominican nun at the convent in Vence, and because he wanted to make a complete environment out of colour and light.

He called it his masterpiece. It is a small white room where the only colour comes through three windows in yellow, blue and green, and moves across the walls as the sun moves.

Death

Matisse died of a heart attack at Nice on 3 November 1954, aged eighty-four. He is buried in the cemetery at Cimiez, above the city.

He had been working almost to the end, directing cut-outs from his bed.

Where to see the work

The Musée Matisse in Nice stands on the hill of Cimiez, where he lived and where he is buried. A second Musée Matisse is at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, his birthplace; he founded it himself in 1952.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris holds the major French collection, and Woman with a Hat is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Why Henri Matisse matters

Matisse settled the question of what colour is for. Before him, colour in European painting largely described things; after him it could be the subject, structure and emotional content of a picture at once. Fauvism lasted three years, and painters have used colour that way ever since.

The cut-outs also show how he worked. In his seventies, unable to stand at an easel after cancer surgery, he invented a medium instead of accepting a smaller late style, and produced work at a scale he had never attempted before.

The goldfish

Among the works of the 1910s are the goldfish pictures, several canvases in which a bowl of orange fish sits at the centre of a studio interior. Matisse returned to the subject repeatedly, drawn to the fish as a note of pure colour and to the bowl as a way of holding the eye at the middle of the composition.