Biography

Biography

Born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first took up painting during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis, and discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it.^[1] In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau.

Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, he made color a crucial element of his paintings from the first. Many of his paintings made between 1899 and 1905 make use of a pontillist technique adopted from Signac.

His first exhibition was in 1901 and his first solo exhibition in 1904. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he moved southwards in 1905 to work with André Derain and spent time on the French Riviera. His paintings of this period are characterized by flat shapes and controlled lines, with expression dominant over detail. He became known as a leader of the Fauves (wild beasts), a group of artists which also included Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck. The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did nothing to affect the rise of Matisse; he had moved beyond them and many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917 when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse.

He was a friend as well as rival of the younger Picasso, to whom he is often compared. A key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists are women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors.

Matisse lived in Cimiez on the French Riviera, now a suburb of the city of Nice, from 1917 until his death in 1954. His work of the decade or so following this relocation shows a relaxation and a softening of his approach. This "return to order" is characteristic of much art of the post-World War I period, and can be compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky, and the return to traditionalism of Derain. After 1930 a new rigor and bolder simplification appear. In 1941 he was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he used a wheelchair. Matisse did not allow this setback to stop him working however, and with the aid of assistants he started creating cut paper collages called gouaches découpés, often large. These demonstrate his ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was "Still Life with Geranium" in 1910, today exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US$ 17 million. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, "Reclining Nude I (Dawn)," sold for US$ 9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

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