Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) – Biography

Matisse was born in northern France, a region with a long textile tradition. He was born in Cateau-Cambrésis on December 31, 1869. After studying law, he worked as a solicitor’s clerk. In 1890, convalescing after an appendicitis operation, his mother gave him a box of paints. This episode determined the radical change of direction in his career. The following year, he gave up law to devote himself to painting. He moved to Paris and enrolled in William Bouguereau’s studio at the Académie Julian, which he soon left to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. He failed the entrance exam. The painter Gustave Moreau accepted him as a free student in his studio, often referred to as the cradle of Fauvist painting. Matisse met Henri Évenepoël, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault. His daughter Marguerite was born in 1894. The following year, Matisse was officially admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Gustave Moreau’s studio. From 1895 to 1897, he spent every summer in Brittany, at Belle-île-en-Mer. His palette gained in color and light. He married Amélie Parayre in 1898. The newlyweds went to London on their honeymoon, where Matisse discovered Turner’s paintings, before spending several months in Corsica and Toulouse. Ajaccio produced in him a “great wonderment for the South”: the generous vegetation, the light and the colors. His painting was enriched by warmer tones. Paul Signac’s Essay, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, published in 1898, undoubtedly encouraged him to practice the division of the brushstroke.

His son Jean was born in January 1899. When he returned to Paris, Gustave Moreau had died. His replacement at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ferdinand Cormon, invited him to leave the studio. Matisse then enrolled in various academies: Julian, Colarossi, Camillo. At the latter, where Eugène Carrière came to correct, he met André Derain. He also studied with Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but soon preferred the municipal school on rue Etienne-Marcel. There, he undertook Jaguar devouring a hare after Barye.

Birth of Pierre, his second son, in June 1900. Matisse creates his first drypoint etching, Autoportrait gravant.

In May 1901, he returned to his family in Bohain, where living conditions were less difficult. From 1904 onwards, his situation improved. In June, Ambroise Vollard organizes the first exhibition devoted entirely to his work. He spent the summer in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross; Matisse tried his hand at neo-impressionist principles. In this style, he painted the famous Luxe, calme et volupté (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne, Paris, on deposit at the Musée d’Orsay), exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in spring 1905 and bought by Signac. In the summer of 1905, the artist stayed in Collioure, where he was joined by Derain. Stimulated by the intensity of the light, they exacerbated their colors, which they compared to “dynamite cartridges”. They present some of their summer creations at the Salon d’Automne, in the famous Room VII, named “cage aux fauves” by critic Louis Vauxcelles, which gives its name to Fauvism. Matisse paints Le Bonheur de vivre (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania), presented in the spring at the Salon des Indépendants, and immediately bought by Gertrude Stein and her brother Léo. Until 1914, their home on rue de Fleurus was an essential meeting place for avant-garde artists. Matisse and Picasso met there in 1906. Picasso’s discovery of Le Bonheur de vivre marked the beginning of their rivalry and artistic dialogue. Picasso responded to Matisse’s painting the following year with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (MoMA, New York). The artist travels to Biskra in Algeria, where he brings back fabrics and ceramics. He painted Nu Bleu souvenir de Biskra (Baltimore Museum of Art), presented at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907.

The following year, he moved to 33 boulevard des Invalides. Spurred on by young admirers, he set up an academy. A significant body of work – thirty paintings, numerous sculptures and drawings – was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1908. His work began to enjoy more international visibility: Alfred Stieglitz exhibited it in New York at his gallery 291; Paul Cassirer in Berlin. Matisse receives his first commissions from Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, including a decoration for his dining room: La Desserte rouge (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Shchukin was a central figure in Matisse’s work. His commissions contributed to the shift in his aesthetic from easel painting to decorative painting. In December, Matisse publishes “Notes d’un peintre” in La Grande Revue, setting out the principles of his art. The following year, Chtchoukine commissioned a large-scale decoration for the staircase of his Moscow home. For the project, Matisse moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux, where he set up a large studio. He produced the bas-relief Dos I (followed by Dos II in 1913; Dos III in 1916-1917; and Dos IV in 1930).

In September 1909, he signed his first contract with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, which devoted a retrospective to him the following year. The large-scale decorations for Shchukin La Danse and La Musique caused a scandal at the Salon d’Automne in 1910. Together with Hans Purrmann, Matisse visits the great exhibition of Muslim art in Munich, which confirms his interest in Islamic art. In November, he travels to Spain (Granada, the Alhambra, Cordoba and Seville) until the end of January 1911. 1911 is a great painting year for Matisse. It saw the birth of his “symphonic interiors”, as Alfred H. Barr put it. Barr’s “symphonic interiors” – L’Atelier rose (Pushkin, Moscow), L’Atelier rouge (MoMA, New York), La Famille du peintre (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) and Intérieur aux eggplants (Musée de Grenoble) – were born. He made a trip to Morocco, to Tangiers in late January-April 1912, followed by a second one after the summer, from late October to mid-February 1913. Paintings from this trip were exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery the same year. This marked the beginning of Matisse’s “experimental” period, which lasted until 1917.

The years 1916-1917 saw Matisse settle in Nice, a period of transition towards the painting of “odalisques”, often seen as a step backwards from the experimental dimension of his painting since 1905-1906. For Matisse, odalisques were in fact another way of responding to the problems posed by painting, notably the relationship between figure and background.

In early 1918, Paul Guillaume presented the first “Matisse Picasso” exhibition at his newly opened gallery at 108 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, featuring some fifteen recent works by each artist. The two artists were to be reunited on several subsequent occasions. Almost ten years after his own discovery of Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Matisse creates the sets and costumes for the company’s ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, choreographed by Léonide Massine and with music by Igor Stravinsky. It premiered in Paris in early February 1920. In the autumn, in Nice, Matisse begins to work after Henriette Darricarrère, who becomes his favorite model for the rest of the decade. The artist publishes Henri Matisse, Cinquante dessins, with a preface by Charles Vildrac. The same year sees the publication of the first monograph devoted to his work by Marcel Sembat, the socialist MP and great admirer and collector of Matisse’s works. In 1923, Marguerite married the Byzantinist Georges Duthuit, who was to develop an original conception of Matisse’s work based on an aesthetic of the decorative in relation to oriental art. In 1925, Matisse began the Têtes d’Henriette series in bronze, which lasted until 1929. He won the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1927 for Compotier et vase de fleurs (1925).

During the years 1928-1929, Matisse went through a severe crisis in his painting following the departure of Henriette, his model for seven years. He found it difficult to regain his inspiration. Faced with the canvas, he felt devoid of ideas. What’s more, from the outside, critics and other commentators were constantly re-evaluating his production in the light of his audacious works prior to the odalisques period. This constituted an additional form of pressure. In printmaking, on the other hand, he was very active, especially in 1929. The stalemate in his painting prompted him to seek out the quality of light in the other hemisphere. Matisse chose Tahiti. The interruption of this trip – from the end of February to the end of July 1930 – with a stopover in New York, followed by the commission for a large-scale decoration for the Barnes Foundation in the United States, helped to kick-start a new beginning.

In 1931, at the same time as working on the decoration for Albert Barnes, he executed the etchings for the illustration of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies published by Albert Skira the following year, just after Ovid’s Métamorphoses illustrated by Picasso. In the summer, a major exhibition at Galerie Georges Petit revealed the odalisques to the public for the first time. In autumn, Alfred H. Barr, the director of MoMA, organized the most ambitious retrospective ever of Matisse’s work, and published a translation of “Notes d’un peintre” in the catalog, definitively introducing Matisse to the American art scene. It was both the first retrospective of Matisse’s work in the United States and MoMA’s first exhibition. 1931 also saw the opening of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which played a decisive role in introducing not only his father’s work to the United States, but also the great founding artists of modernism (Georges Rouault, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, etc.). In 1932, an error in dimensions forced Matisse to undertake a new version of La Danse for Albert Barnes. This work kept him busy throughout the year. He hired an assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his model from 1934 onwards. She featured in major paintings of the period, such as Le Rêve (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris) and Grand Nu Couché (Nu Rose) at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which marked the artist’s return to the bold painting that preceded his odalisques.

He travels to Merion in May 1933 for the installation of La Danse at the Barnes Foundation. On his return, he completed the incorrectly dimensioned version of the decoration, acquired by the city of Paris in January 1937 and named La Danse de Paris (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris). During these years, Matisse multiplied his decorative projects. In 1935, through his son Pierre, he met Marie Cuttoli, who was looking for new models to revive tapestry production in the Aubusson workshops. He produced a cardboard window in Tahiti, followed by a second with solid colors to facilitate transposition into tapestry. The following year, he agreed to design the sets, costumes and stage curtain for Leonide Massine’s ballet L’Étrange Farandole(Rouge et Noir), set to Shostakovich’s first symphony. For the set, he uses the principle of the large arches of The Dance of the Barnes Foundation, and for the curtain, some of the figures. The studies and research for the composition of the curtain are among the first cut-out gouache compositions created by Matisse.

In January 1938, in the former Hotel Excelsior-Régina in Nice’s Cimiez district, he bought two adjoining apartments, which he joined together. This was his last home-studio. Matisse’s second major text, “Notes d’un peintre sur son dessin”, is published in July 1939 in the magazine Le Point. At the end of the year, he begins La Blouse roumaine, completed in April the following year (Centre Georges Pompidou, musée national d’Art moderne/CCI, Paris). Matisse spends the war in France, like many other artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault. He lived in Nice, then Vence. In early January 1941, he underwent emergency surgery in Lyon for a tumor in his duodenum. His convalescence was long. He did not return to Nice until the end of May. The operation had a major impact on his practice. It liberated his ability to let go, to abandon himself in confidence to his own sensitivity. This materialized first in his drawings through the important “Thèmes et Variations” series, partly collected in the book Henri Matisse, Drawings. Themes and Variations published with a preface by Louis Aragon, “Matisse-en-France”, by Martin Fabiani in 1943. In these drawings, Matisse sees “considerable progress in ease and freely expressed sensitivity”. This great experience in drawing played a key role. It irrigated his work from the following years until the end of his career. He painted the famous Nature morte au magnolia (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne/CCI, Paris). At the same time, he began illustrating a Florilège des Amours by Pierre de Ronsard, which aroused his interest in book illustration. He then multiplied his projects and creations: Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos by Henry de Montherlant, Les Poésies de Charles d’Orléans, Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, Les Lettres d’une religieuse portugaise, Marianna Alcaforado. The war years also saw the production of the book Jazz, published by Tériade, for which Matisse designed cut-out gouache compositions (stencilled in the album) that were the starting point for the development of this practice in his work. Cutting out color with scissors was a way of combining drawing, painting and sculpture in a single gesture. In April-May 1944, Amélie Matisse, the artist’s wife, and his daughter Marguerite were arrested by the Gestapo for acts of resistance. Immediately after the war, Matisse’s work was in the news: a retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1945, following Picasso’s the previous year, a Matisse Picasso exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the November publication of the Verve “Henri Matisse. De la Couleur” (vol. IV, no. 13), revealing his painting from the war years, and another exhibition of his recent work at Galerie Maeght in December. The new youthfulness of his work is universally acclaimed. In the summer of 1946, he painted Océanie, Le Ciel and Océanie, La Mer on the walls of one of the rooms in his apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse, reminiscent of the sensations he had experienced during his stay in Tahiti in 1930. They were reproduced in silkscreen on linen and published by textile manufacturer Zika Ascher. Matisse composes two tapestry cartoons on the same theme, commissioned by the Manufacture des Gobelins : Polynésie, Le Ciel; Polynésie, La Mer. These were the first large-scale decorations created using cut paper. In 1946-1948, he completed his last major painting season with the “Intérieurs de Vence” series, which found its equivalent in large-scale brush drawings in Indian ink. At the same time, he designed a whole series of small compositions in cut-out gouache.

When it was published at the end of 1947, Jazz was enthusiastically received by the public. The following year, Matisse undertook the decoration of the Chapelle du Rosaire at the Dominicaines de Vence. At the time, religious art was undergoing a revival led by Father Marie-Alain Couturier. In the Vence chapel, two walls of stained glass dialogue with three brush and ink drawings on ceramic panels : Saint Dominique, La Vierge à l’Enfant and a Chemin de Croix. Matisse called the Chapelle “his masterpiece”. Following the success of the Philadelphia Museum retrospective in spring 1948, Pierre Matisse presented his father’s last works in his gallery in February 1949. Paintings and large-scale brush drawings in Indian ink shared the gallery walls with cut-out gouaches from the same period. During the summer, the exhibition was presented at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, with the addition of illustrated books, Oceania hangings and Polynesian tapestries, under the title Henri Matisse. Recent works 1947-1948 . The last years of his career were devoted to large-scale cut-out gouaches and brush drawings in Indian ink, such as the great Acrobates of 1952. After the chapelle de Vence, inaugurated in June 1951, Matisse increasingly turned to the creation of large-scale environments, such as La Perruche et la sirène (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and La Piscine (MoMA, New York), which chronologically frame the series of blue nudes. At the same time, through the intermediary of his son Pierre, he received commissions from America for stained-glass windows and ceramics, for which he composed cut-out gouache models. This last part of his work was revealed after his death in Verve‘s double volume, “Henri Matisse. Les dernières années 1950-1954”, published in 1958 (n°35-36), for which he designed the cover – the famous orange cover – and layout in 1954.

Matisse died in Nice on November 3, 1954. He is buried in the Cimiez cemetery.