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 Color for Matisse was like music, and he often said that he heard "colors sing." The harmonies he worked to transcribe, though, were the hidden ones -- the colors and emotions inside the objects. He aimed to "retain only what cannot be seen," and his vast artistic legacy illustrates that Matisse succeeded in achieving this extremely subtle and challenging goal.
Henri Matisse was born on New Year’s Eve of 1869. He lived in Bohain, France, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. His father then sent Henri to Paris to study law, a vocation that hardly interested the young man who preferred to spend most of his time at the Louvre. When Matisse was twenty, he returned to St. Quentin and began drawing classes. However, shortly after completing his first painting in 1890, he returned to Paris to study art despite his father’s disapproval.
After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, Matisse left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. The next year he met Gustave Moreau, who showed genuine interest in the personal attitudes and individualism of his students. Moreau stood as an encouraging force in his student’s artwork, pushing Matisse to follow his own vision in hopes that the young student would "simplify painting." In the early 1890s, however, Matisse focused on neither vision nor simplification. Instead, he spent much of his time copying famous works of art at the Louvre, both to make money and to improve his technique.
Matisse devoted the first years of his career to still life painting. Drawn in the style of the Northern school’s establishment, his early works (pre-1895) were shadow-filled and heavy, with dark colors adding much depth to the canvas. Matisse discovered the brightness of contrast, for which he later became famous, when he began painting landscapes in Brittany the following year. The light he saw in the land began to shine on everything; he started to paint fruits, exploring Fauvism through the tonal interactions of lemons, apples, and peaches. Though Matisse could hardly be accused of copying Cézanne, he did look to his precursor for the relationship that color allowed between surface and depth. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. In this way, his first paintings lay an appropriate foundation for later works; he sought to depict the emotions he felt in an object rather than just the mathematical dimensions of that object. When you draw a tree, he often said, you must feel yourself growing with it. His still life paintings allowed Matisse to grow from a stack of books on his table to the people around him and even to the landscape outside.
In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Although Matisse dismissed this criticism to narrow-mindedness, he decided to take a year’s rest from painting to search for his own path. Soon enough he had his Modernist revelation: "a love of the materials of painting for their own sake." Finished with copying images from the Louvre, he was determined to find his own subjects and express his images with a language and style entirely his own.
The veteran Impressionist Camille Pissarro, whom Matisse met in 1898, advised the younger artist to go to London. Matisse had just married Amélie Parayre, and after a short trip to London, the two traveled to Corsica. In January of 1899, when they visited Amélie’s parents in Toulouse, their first child Jean was born. Amélie took care of the family, working as a milliner to support her son and husband. A devoted wife, she would often stay awake with Matisse, who had insomnia; in addition, she never complained that art always won her husband’s attention over everything else. The family relocated to Paris in 1899, but poverty forced them to move in with Matisse’s parents at Bohain three years later. He felt he was in a "prison they call the artistic life," characterized by Studio under the Eaves (1902). In this painting, bright trees outside a window stand in contrast to the tiny, dark room where presumably the artist stands.
The almost accidental light in this painting infused Matisse’s later works with the clean, pure colors of the south of France. After spending the summer of 1904 in Saint Tropez, Matisse painted his first landscape from imagination. The work, Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, describes a paradise where the sun, a symbol for Matisse’s inspiration, always shines. Matisse found this symbolic sun, this light that made the whole world paintable, on the Mediterranean. He spent a summer working in Collioure with André Derain, and together they invented a style that would "exalt all the colors together, sacrificing none of them." The Open Window, a perfect example of this new style, challenged the pessimism of Studio under the Eaves. Art had changed for Matisse, now serving as a connector instead of a cage. He had learned that to steep oneself in an object was to "possess nature" rather than to be oppressed by nature’s emotional power. To reach such unity with nature, Matisse invoked the primitive quality of children’s art, which offered a fresh simplicity to the viewer. When Picasso, who also enjoyed this "new" primitive style, traded paintings with Matisse in 1907, Picasso chose Marguerite for its earthiness and spunk.
After teaching for several years at the Académie Matisse, where the artist gave free lessons, Matisse moved around from Spain to Tangier and then back to Paris. In 1909 he painted La Danse, whose intense combination of form and content makes the work a masterpiece. Inspired by a circular dance -- perhaps a sardana -- performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective in this painting. The painting’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists.
From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." In 1917 he began spending winters in Nice, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler ways which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he started going to Paris only for a few months each summer.
Restless after about fifteen straight years of painting, Matisse began concentrating on different media. He worked on a mural of La Danse from 1931 to 1932, and illustrated Mallarmé’s La Chevelure with drawings in 1932. In 1938, Amélie left her husband, after decades of neglect and the knowledge of Henri’s affair with the model Lydia Delectorskaya. Around this time, with hands too aged for the careful technique that painting demanded, Matisse began his cutout projects. The first pieces for the book Jazz (which would be published in 1947) were The Clown and The Toboggan. The light and clarity of these images, brightened by the return of joy in the postwar era, are mixed with the anxiety of Matisse’s physical handicaps. In some ways the cutouts complete Matisse’s artistic life, as he found his inspiration for these works in "crystallizations of memories." Matisse said that the blue dominating these pieces "enter[ed his] soul" and was "the light of the mind." Their abstract quality and lack of depth gave Matisse more qualities of Modernism, a movement in whose birth his art played a large role.
The last light that Matisse captured was that of the sun itself, in his designs for the chapel at Vence where visitors were "to feel purified and relieved of their burdens." The religiosity implied by this work upset fellow artists such as Picasso, but Matisse explained the chapel as a way "to express [him]self completely." His work had thus moved from the concrete to the spiritual, from the moment back to the past. In 1951, the MOMA exhibited a retrospective that honored the artwork of Matisse’s entire career. He died three years later at the age of 85.
Though Matisse constructed a style that was all his own, he revered the Old Masters and the influence they had on how he viewed, thought, and painted. "I owe my art to all painters," declared Matisse during an interview in 1949. What he saw in the work of past painters helped him piece together what lay within himself. He brought to light a calm that combined his mind with the outside world, and his legacy fulfills Goethe’s words: "Light is there and color surrounds us. Nevertheless if we did not have light and color in our eyes, we would not perceive them outside."
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