Matisse hails from 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. 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 Ecole 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 Fauve painting. Matisse met Henri Evenepoël, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault. His daughter Marguerite was born in 1894. The following year, Matisse was officially admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Gustave Moreau's studio. From 1895 to 1897, he spent every summer in Brittany, on Belle-île. 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, and the couple spent 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 was dead. 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. In the latter, where Eugène Carrière came to correct, he met André Derain. He also studied for a time with Antoine Bourdelle, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière; he 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 makes his first drypoint engraving, Self-Portrait Engraving.

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

 

Matisse_Henri_Le_Cirque_in_Jazz_1947

Le Cirque, in Jazz, print, 1946 © Succession H. Matisse

The following year, he moved to 33 boulevard des Invalides. Under the impetus of young admirers he created an academy. An important group of his works - thirty paintings, numerous sculptures and drawings - was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1908. His work began to benefit from a more international visibility: Alfred Stieglitz exhibited it in New York in his gallery 291; Paul Cassirer in Berlin. Matisse received his first commissions from the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, notably a decoration for his dining room: La Desserte rouge (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum). Shchukin was a central figure in Matisse's work. His commissions contributed to the inflection of his aesthetic from easel painting to decorative painting. In December, Matisse published "Notes d'un peintre" in La Grande Revue where he explained the principles of his art. The following year, Chtchoukine commissioned him to create a large decoration for the staircase of his Moscow home. For its realization, Matisse moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux where he set up a large studio. He created 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 exhibition to him the following year. The large decorations for Chtchoukine The Dance and The Music caused a scandal at the Salon d'Automne in 1910. The artist visited the great exhibition of Muslim art in Munich with Hans Purrmann, which confirmed his interest in Islamic art; in November he traveled to Spain (Granada, the Alhambra, Cordoba and Seville) until the end of January 1911. It saw the birth of the "Symphonic Interiors", according to Alfred H. Barr's expression, that are L'Atelier de la Villette. Barr, which are The Pink Studio (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), The Red Studio (New York, MoMA), The Painter's Family (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), Interior with Eggplants (Grenoble Museum). He made a trip to Morocco, to Tangier at the end of January - April 1912, followed by a second trip after the summer from the end of October to mid-February 1913. The paintings from this trip were presented 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 are those of his installation in Nice and constitute a period of transition towards the painting of "odalisques", often considered as a step backwards in comparison with the experimental dimension of his painting since 1905-1906. The odalisques were in fact another way for Matisse to respond to the problems posed by painting, particularly the relationship between the figure and the background.

 

Les Codomas, in Jazz, print, 1946 © Succession H. Matisse

At the beginning of 1918, Paul Guillaume presented, in the gallery he had just opened at 108 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, the first "Matisse Picasso" exhibition with about fifteen recent works by each artist. The two artists were to be reunited several times thereafter. Nearly ten years after his own discovery of Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Matisse in turn created the sets and costumes for a ballet by the company, Le Chant du Rossignol, with choreography by Léonide Massine and music by Igor Stravinsky. The premiere took place in Paris in early February 1920. In the fall, in Nice, Matisse began to work after Henriette Darricarrère, who became his favorite model until the end of the decade. The artist publishes Henri Matisse, Cinquante dessins, with a preface by Charles Vildrac. The same year, the first monograph devoted to his work was published by Marcel Sembat, the socialist deputy, a great admirer and collector of Matisse's works. In 1923 Marguerite married the Byzantinist Georges Duthuit who developed an original conception of Matisse's work based on an aesthetic of decoration in relation to oriental art. In 1925, Matisse began the series of Têtes d'Henriette in bronze which lasted until 1929. He was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1927 for Compotier et vase de fleurs of 1925.

During the years 1928-1929 Matisse went through a rather sharp crisis in painting that followed the departure of Henriette, his model for seven years. He had difficulty finding inspiration. Faced with the canvas he felt devoid of ideas. Moreover, from the outside, critics and other commentators, his production of the time is constantly re-evaluated in the light of his bold works prior to the odalisques period. This constitutes an additional form of pressure. In printmaking, on the other hand, his activity is dense, especially in 1929. The stalemate in his painting encouraged him to go and see the quality of light in the other hemisphere. Matisse chose Tahiti. The break in this trip - from the end of February to the end of July 1930 - with a stopover in New York, followed by the commission of a large decoration for the Barnes Foundation in the United States, contributed to initiate a new departure.

In 1931, at the same time as his work on the decoration for Albert Barnes, he executed the etchings intended for the illustration of the Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé published by Albert Skira the following year, just after the Metamorphoses of Ovid illustrated by Picasso. In the summer, a major exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery revealed the odalisques to the public for the first time. While in the fall Alfred H. Barr, the director of MoMA, organized the most ambitious retrospective of his work and published in the catalog the translation of "Notes of a Painter", introducing Matisse definitively into the American artistic landscape. This was both the first retrospective of Matisse's work in the United States and the first exhibition at MoMA. 1931 was also the year that the Pierre Matisse Gallery opened in New York, which played a decisive role in presenting not only his father's work in the United States but also the great founding artists of modernity (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 The Dance for Albert Barnes. This work kept him busy all year. He hired an assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his model in 1934. She appears in major paintings of these years such as The Dream (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou) and Large Reclining Nude (Pink Nude) from Baltimore, which mark the artist's return to the bold painting of before the odalisques.

He went to Merion in May 1933 for the installation of The Dance at the Barnes Foundation. On his return, he completed the version of the decoration with the wrong dimensions, acquired by the city of Paris in January 1937, named for it The Dance of Paris (Museum of Modern Art in Paris). During these years Matisse multiplied the decorative projects. Through his son Pierre, he met Marie Cuttoli in 1935 in search of new models to revive the production of tapestry workshops Aubusson. He executed a cardboard Window in Tahiti followed by a second with flat colors to facilitate the transposition into tapestry. The following year, he agreed to create the sets, costumes and stage curtain for Leonid Massine's ballet, The Strange Farandole(Red and Black), based on the first symphony of Shostakovich. 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 compositions in cut-out gouache created by Matisse.

 

The Nightmare of the White Elephant, in Jazz, print proof, 1946 © Succession H. Matisse

In January 1938, in the former Excelsior-Régina hotel in Nice on the heights of Cimiez, he bought two adjoining apartments that he joined together. This was his last home-workshop. Matisse's second major text, "Notes d'un peintre sur son dessin" (Notes of a painter on his drawing), was published in July 1939 in the magazine Le Point. At the end of the year, he began La Blouse roumaine, completed in April of the following year (Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou). Matisse spent the war in France, as did many artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault. He lived in Nice, then in Vence. In early January 1941, he underwent emergency surgery in Lyon for a tumor in the duodenum. His convalescence was long. He did not return to Nice until the end of May. The operation had essential consequences on his practice. It frees his capacity to let himself go, to abandon himself in confidence to his own sensitivity. This materializes first in his drawing through the important series of "Themes and Variations", partly collected in the book Henri Matisse, Drawings. Thèmes et Variations published with a preface by Louis Aragon, "Matisse-en-France", by Martin Fabiani in 1943. Matisse sees in these drawings, a "considerable progress as ease, sensitivity freely expressed. This great experience in drawing has a nodal place. It irrigated his work in the following years until the end of his career. He painted the famous Still Life with Magnolia (Paris, National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou). At the same time, he undertook the illustration of a collection of Pierre de Ronsard's Amours, which aroused in him a passion for book illustration. He then multiplies the projects and achievements: Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos by Henry de Montherlant, Les Poésies de Charles d'Orléans, Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, Les Lettres de Marianna Alcaforado. The war years were also those of the realization of the book Jazz, published by Tériade, for which Matisse conceived compositions in cut-out gouache which were the starting point for the development of this practice in his work. Cutting out color with scissors is a way of bringing together 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. Just after the war, Matisse's work received a lot of attention: a retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1945, after Picasso the year before, a Matisse Picasso exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the publication in November of the Verve "Henri Matisse De la Couleur" (vol. IV, no. 13), which revealed his painting from the war years, another exhibition of his recent work at Galerie Maeght in December. The new youthfulness of his work is welcomed from all sides. In the summer of 1946, he painted on the walls of one of the rooms of his apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse, Oceania, The Sky; Oceania, The Sea, which are reminiscences of the sensations he experienced during his stay in Tahiti in 1930. They were reproduced in silkscreen on linen and published by the textile manufacturer Zika Ascher. Matisse composed two tapestry cartoons on the same theme at the request of the Manufacture des Gobelins Polynesia, The Sky; Polynesia, The Sea. These creations are the first large decorations designed in cut paper. In 1946-1948 he realized his last great season of painting with the series of "Intérieurs de Vence" which found its equivalent in large brush drawings in Indian ink. At the same time, he conceived a whole series of small compositions in cut-out gouache.

When it was published at the end of 1947, Jazz received a rave reception from the public. The following year, in the context of the renewal of sacred art, of which Father Marie-Alain Couturier was one of the main instigators, Matisse undertook the decoration of the Rosary Chapel of the Dominican Sisters of Vence. Two walls of stained glass windows interact with three brush and ink drawings on ceramic panels: Saint Dominique, The Virgin and Child, and a Way of the Cross. Matisse considered the Chapel to be "his masterpiece". Following the success of the Philadelphia Museum retrospective in the spring of 1948, Pierre Matisse presented his father's last works in his gallery in February 1949. Paintings and large brush drawings in Indian ink shared the gallery walls with gouaches from the same period. The exhibition is presented during the summer at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, with the addition of illustrated books, the Oceania hangings and the Polynesian tapestries, under the title Henri Matisse. Œuvres récentes 1947-1948. The last years of his work are devoted to large gouaches and brush drawings with Indian ink such as the large Acrobats of 1952. After the chapel of Vence, inaugurated in June 1951, Matisse tended more and more to the creation of large environments La Perruche et la sirène (Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum) and La Piscine (New York, MoMA) 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 models in cut-out gouache. This last part of his work is revealed after his death by the double volume of Verve, "Henri Matisse. Les dernières années 1950-1954", published in 1958 (n°35-36), for which he designed the cover - the famous orange cover - and the layout in 1954.

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

The Horse, the Horsewoman and the Clown, in Jazz, print proof, 1946 © Succession H. Matisse

 

Matisse engraver

Matisse is the author of a rather important body of prints composed of autonomous engravings and illustration engravings. His engraved work covers several processes - drypoint, etching, woodcut, lithography, linocut, aquatint - and unfolds in periods until 1941. He started engraving at the beginning of the century, in 1900-1903 - his first engraving, Self-portrait engraving, is a drypoint in 1900, then in 1913-1914, then between 1922 and 1929. The twenties constitute one of the peaks of the artist's creation in lithography with notably Grande odalisque en culotte bayadère of 1925, or Nu au coussin bleu à côté d'une cheminée, of the same year. In 1931, with the etchings for the illustration of the Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé (Albert Skira), engraving experienced a resurgence. Matisse executed his first linocuts in 1938. He used this process to illustrate Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos by Montherlant in 1942 (Martin Fabiani). Finally, from 1941, the pace accelerates with books and aquatints. Like Picasso twenty years earlier, it was Roger Lacourière who introduced Matisse to sugar aquatint. A new period opened in engraving from 1946 to 1952 with about fifty aquatints that echoed the drawings of the same period executed with a large brush loaded with Indian ink.

The engraving has several statuses in the work of Matisse. It is a field of experimentation and research; an extension of his drawing; a complement to his other means of expression. With Matisse, the passage from one process to another is frequent, especially when he finds himself in a creative impasse. He then continued his research in another technique.

The catalog raisonné of illustrated books has one hundred and thirty-nine numbers. Among these, ten are illustrated books in the Matissian sense - one could also say decorated books according to the expression suggested by Raymond Escholier and approved by the artist. In other words, Matisse made a distinction between works in which he collaborated with one or more engravings without any other involvement, for example James Joyce's Ulysses (1935), and those that he himself composed entirely, which he more readily referred to as "his" books. Most of them were executed in a very short period of time between 1941 and 1948. The illustration of the Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, "my first book" wrote the artist in "Comment j'ai fait mes livres" (published in theAnthologie du livre illustré par les peintres et sculpteurs de l'Ecole de Paris, Geneva, Skira, 1946), inaugurated his conception of the illustrated book in 1931. Matisse did not return to it until ten years later with Les Amours de Pierre de Ronsard which opened an extraordinarily rich period in this field. The achievements follow one another, and sometimes even overlap: Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos by Henry de Montherlant, Poems of Charles d'Orleans, Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, the poetry of Pierre Reverdy(Visages), The letters of Marianna Alcaforado, known as Les Lettres portugaises, the book Jazz, or the prose of his old friend André Rouveyre in Repli.

It is to his daughter Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse, that the artist entrusted the care of supervising the printing of his engravings and the realization of his books. In this task, Marguerite had the same requirement as her father. Claude Duthuit, the artist's son and grandson, author of the catalog raisonné, reports a remark by Rouault on this subject "There is only one being more difficult than me with printers, it is Matisse's daughter."[1].

Anne Coron, Doctor in History of Contemporary Art

Gallery of the Institute

[1] Claude Duthuit 1983, p. XI