Henri Matisse

• 1. Introduction

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  Henri Émile Benoît Matisse did not pick up a paintbrush until he was nineteen years old. He had been trained as a lawyer, and was working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France when his mother brought him art supplies during a period of recovery from appendicitis. What happened next, by his own account, was the discovery of "a kind of paradise." He walked away from the law, deeply disappointed his father, and spent the next six and a half decades reshaping the way the world understood colour and form.

  His earliest critics compared his paintings to a pot of paint flung in the face of the public. His late works, made with scissors and paper while he was too frail to stand at an easel, were hailed as among the most inventive art of the twentieth century. Between those two verdicts lay a life of relentless reinvention, intimate friendships with Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein, a wartime choice to remain in occupied France, and a family whose suffering in the Resistance would haunt him to his final years.

  What drove a former law clerk to become, alongside Picasso, one of the defining artists of modernism? And what does it mean that his last finished artistic creation was a stained-glass window, whose design was still pinned to the wall of his bedroom when he died?

• 2. From Law to the Louvre

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  In 1891, Matisse returned to Paris to study under two teachers who could scarcely have been more different. At the Académie Julian he worked beneath William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a master of polished academic realism. At the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts he studied under Gustave Moreau, a Symbolist who pushed his students to follow their own visions rather than the rules of formality. Matisse painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional manner and became genuinely proficient, but the real formation of his eye happened quietly, in the galleries of the Louvre.

  Chardin was the painter Matisse most admired as a student, and he made copies of four of Chardin's paintings there. He also absorbed the influence of Nicolas Poussin and Antoine Watteau, as well as Édouard Manet and the Japanese print tradition. These were not passing enthusiasms: they were the foundations on which his own very different art would eventually be built.

  The decisive break came in 1896, when Matisse visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island of Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell had been a friend of Vincent van Gogh, and he gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing. He also explained colour theory to him in terms that Matisse later said made Russell his true teacher. Matisse's earth-coloured palette was abandoned almost immediately in favour of bright, intense colour. That same year he exhibited five paintings at the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state purchased two of them.

• 3. Wild Beasts and Open Windows

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  The critic Louis Vauxcelles did not intend to name a movement when he wrote about a lone Renaissance-style sculpture surrounded by an "orgy of pure tones" as "Donatello chez les fauves" - Donatello among the wild beasts. His comment appeared on the 17th of October 1905 in the daily newspaper Gil Blas and immediately passed into common usage. The artists in that room at the Salon d'Automne, including Matisse and André Derain, became the Fauves, and the name stuck even as the movement itself was brief. As a formal group, Fauvism lasted only from 1904 to 1908 and mounted just three exhibitions.

  Matisse's Woman with a Hat was the painting singled out for the harshest condemnation at that 1905 salon. Another critic, Camille Mauclair, declared that a pot of paint had been flung in the face of the public. When Gertrude and Leo Stein bought that same painting, the embattled Matisse felt his morale improve considerably.

  Guillaume Apollinaire, writing about Matisse in 1907 in La Falange, offered a counterintuitive defence: "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Reasonable or not, his Nu bleu of 1907 was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913.

  The Fauvist moment ended quickly, but it pushed Matisse toward a decade of sustained greatness. He travelled to Algeria in 1906, viewing African art and Primitivism firsthand. After attending a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent two months in Spain studying Moorish art. His trips to Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913, painting in Tangier, introduced a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, visible in L'Atelier Rouge of 1911.

• 4. The Steins and the Shchukin Circle

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  Around April 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso, who was eleven years his junior, at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein. The friendship that grew from that meeting lasted the rest of their lives, combining genuine affection with open rivalry. One distinction the source draws clearly: Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was more inclined to work from imagination.

  Gertrude Stein later credited Matisse himself with inadvertently starting the famous Saturday evening gatherings at 27 rue de Fleurus. She recalled: "More and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings … Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance." The circle that gathered included Georges Braque, André Derain, the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Rousseau.

  Gertrude's two American friends from Baltimore, the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, became major patrons of both Matisse and Picasso, eventually collecting hundreds of their paintings and drawings. That collection is now housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art.

  The Russian collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned Matisse to create one of his major works, La Danse, as part of a two-painting group; the companion piece was Music, completed in 1910. An earlier version of La Danse from 1909 entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  Matisse's friends from this circle organised and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private, non-commercial school where he taught young artists from 1907 until 1911. The initiative came from the Steins and the Dômiers, with the involvement of Hans Purrmann, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Sarah Stein.

• 5. War, Occupation, and Resistance

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  Matisse's wife Amélie ended their 41-year marriage in July 1939, suspecting an affair with her young Russian emigrée companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. Delectorskaya attempted suicide by shooting herself in the chest; she survived with no serious after-effects and returned to work with Matisse for the rest of his life, running his household, managing his correspondence, and coordinating his business affairs.

  When the Nazis invaded France in June 1940, Matisse was visiting Paris. He made his way back to Nice, and his son Pierre, by then a gallery owner in New York, urged him to flee to Brazil. Matisse was prepared to go, then changed his mind. In September 1940, he wrote to Pierre: "It seemed to me as if I would be deserting. If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?" He stayed in Vichy France, exhibited under Nazi occupation, and was required to sign an oath assuring his "Aryan" status, as were all French artists who wished to show their work.

  His family's wartime experience was far more dangerous. His estranged wife Amélie became a typist for the French Underground and was jailed for six months. His daughter Marguerite, who had been active in the Résistance, was tortured by the Gestapo in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She managed to escape from the train to Ravensbrück when it was halted during an Allied air raid, and survived hidden in the woods until fellow resisters found her. Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

  Pierre Matisse, from his New York gallery, helped Jewish and anti-Nazi French artists he represented to escape occupied France. His 1942 exhibition "Artists in Exile" became legendary in the New York art world.

• 6. Scissors as a Second Life

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  In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery was successful, but the complications nearly killed him. Three months of bed rest forced a reckoning with how he would continue to make art at all, and from that confinement came the technique he would develop for the rest of his life: cutting pre-painted sheets of paper into shapes and arranging them into compositions.

  The technique was not entirely new to him. His first recorded use of paper cut-outs was in 1919, during the design of stage decor for Le chant du rossignol, an opera by Igor Stravinsky. A second group of cut-outs followed between 1937 and 1938, while he worked on sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After his operation, though, the medium transformed from a working tool into a primary art form.

  His artist's book Jazz, produced while he was living on the hilltop of Vence, France from 1943, was his first major cut-out project. When he introduced the 1946 edition, he wrote: "An artist must never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success."

  He called his final years his "second life." Limited in mobility, he could still wander through gardens, he said, in the form of his cut-outs. Works such as Oceania the Sky and Oceania the Sea, both from 1946, were assembled on the walls of a room under his direction by Lydia Delectorskaya, who pinned silhouettes of birds, fish, and marine vegetation loosely into place. Those two works, evoking a trip to Tahiti he had made years before, were his first cut-outs at mural scale.

  In May 1954, his cut-out The Sheaf was exhibited at the Salon de Mai. Originally a commission for American collectors Sidney and Frances Brody, it was adapted into a ceramic for their house in Los Angeles and is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• 7. Chapel, Museum, and a Final Window

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  Matisse's connection to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence began with a nurse named Monique Bourgeois, who answered his advertisement for help in 1941. A platonic friendship developed; he discovered she was an amateur artist and taught her about perspective. When Bourgeois left his employ in 1944 to enter a convent and became a Dominican nun in 1946, Matisse painted the chapel in Vence in her honour, spending from 1948 until its completion preparing the designs for its windows, chasubles, and tabernacle door, all using the cut-out method.

  Finishing his last painting in 1951 and his last sculpture the year before, Matisse used paper cut-outs exclusively as his means of expression for the final years of his life. In 1952, he established a museum dedicated to his own work in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the town where he was born. That museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France.

  The Musée Matisse in Nice, housed in a seventeenth-century villa in the neighbourhood of Cimiez, opened in 1963 and holds one of the world's largest collections of his work, tracing his development from his earliest pieces to his last.

  Matisse died of a heart attack on the 3rd of November 1954, at the age of 84. He is buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez in Nice. According to David Rockefeller, Matisse's final artistic creation was the design for a stained-glass window at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, near the Rockefeller estate north of New York City. The maquette was still on the wall of his bedroom when he died. Installation of the window was completed in 1956.