Monday, August 10, 2020

Artist of the day, August 10, 2020: Henri Matisse, a French artist, painter, sculptor (#1063)

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869 – 1954) was a French artist, known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (wild beasts). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.

His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Matisse initially worked in law, but discovered a passion for art when he began painting as an amateur. He went on to study traditional academic painting. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, he rejected the idea that painting had to imitate the appearance of nature. His characteristic innovations were the use of vibrant, arbitrary colors; bold, autonomous brushstrokes; and a flattening of spatial depth.

Ironically, Matisse often applied his thoroughly modern style to traditional subjects such as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Such works express a sense of timeless joy and stillness that runs counter to the frenetic, technologically inspired compositions of many of his contemporaries. Although primarily dedicated to painting, Matisse was also active as a sculptor and printmaker. In the 1940s, in failing health, he embarked on a well-known group of cut-paper collages.

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 Mr. Henri Matisse

 Woman reading
1894

 The dinner table 
1897

 Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi
1902

 Luxe, calme et volupté
1904

 La dance
1905

 Portrait of Madame Matisse
1905

 Femme au chapeau
1905

 Le bonheur de vivre
1906

 Self-portrait in a striped T-shirt 
1906

 Blue nude
1907

 Bathers with a turtle
1908

 The Goldfish
1912

 The Moroccans
1912

 Arabian Coffee House
1913
 The blue window
1913

 Vue de Notre-Dame
1914
Bathers by a river
1916

Bathers by a river
1916

 Interior at Nice
 1920

 Large reclining nude
1935

 Window in Tahiti
1935

 Robe violette et Anémones
1937

 Woman in a Purple Coat
1937

La musique
1939

 La blouse roumaine
1940

 Codomas
1943
 Le lanceur de couteaux
1947

 Portrait of LN Delekorskaya
1947

 Nu bleu IV
1952

 Sorrow of the King
1952

 The Parakeet and the Mermaid
1952

 La gerbe
1953

 Le bateau
1953

 The Snail
1953

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