The career of Henri Matisse

The career of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who is often considered to be the greatest French painter of the twentieth century, had several important stages. His first major works were identified with the group of artists known as the Fauves (or "wild beasts") because of their violent colors and their nonrealistic treatment of space and form. In Matisse's middle phase he retreated to somewhat more realistic representations of sunny Mediterranean scenes and became more interested in creating patterns than in breaking down the relationships between forms and space. But, at the end of his life, Matisse once again rejected standard types of representation and worked with paper cutouts, creating works that focused on the effects of movement, color, and shape.

Matisse did not show any interest in art in childhood or adolescence. He attended secondary school in northern France and went to Paris to study law in 1887. But in 1890, while recovering from an attack of appendicitis, Matisse was given a box of paints to amuse himself and after that, he said, "I did not lead my life. It led me" ("Matisse"). In 1891 he returned to Paris to study painting at the +cole des Beaux-Arts with the popular academic painter Adolphe Bougeureau. He soon switched "to a more flexible teacher," the more advanced painter Gustave Moreau ("Matisse"). Matisse became an excellent copyist of older styles but when he discovered the art of the Impressionists and more recent artists, such as Gauguin and CT

was as important as Woman with a Hat (1905) had been. The painting's "extreme flatness, totally nonatmospheric space, and highly abstracted and schematic manner of representation mark a more complete break with Renaissance illusionism" than any previous painting (Elderfield 57). Over the next few years, however, Matisse became very interest in the problems of form raised by the Cubists. Though he never became a Cubist artist himself, his sculpture and painting reflected his interest in "a system of constructing space by overlapping and interpenetrating planes" (Hamilton 172). Matisse's palette became much darker in this period and his work in this "constructivist" style reached it climax in Piano Lesson (1916), a very large (approximately 8' x 12') painting of an interior in which his son practices the piano while the figure of his teacher sits behind him on a high stool. There are few objects in the paintings and the spaces indicating walls, window, and piano are "broad, open compartments of tranquil color that both flatten and enlarge the pictorial space" and seem to push the few objects in the painting to its edges (Elderfield 114). Matisse was unfit for military service because of his age and so during World War I he