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 CTzanne, he began to experiment. He worked in Impressionist and Pointillist styles while "seeking a more direct synthesis of colour and design" (Hamilton 159). As his paintings grew bolder Matisse began to emerge as the leader (and the oldest) of a small group of younger painters, which included AndrT Derain, Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque, and Raoul Dufy.
This group exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, which had been formed by a group of progressive artists "t...