Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (✦ 31 December 1869 – †3 November 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 patterns. 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.

Death

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, in the Cimiez neighborhood of Nice.

Wikipedia article: Henri Matisse

Partial List of works by Henri Matisse

Woman Reading (1894), Musée National d'Art Moderne Paris
Le Mur Rose (1898), Musée National d'Art Moderne
Canal du Midi (1898), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi (1902), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (1904), Musée National d'Art Moderne
Green Stripe (1905)
The Open Window (1905)
Woman with a Hat (1905)
Les toits de Collioure (1905)
Landscape at Collioure (1905)
Le bonheur de vivre (1906)
The Young Sailor II (1906)
Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt (1906)
Madras Rouge (1907)
Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)|Blue Nude (1907), Baltimore Museum of Art
The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room) (1908)
Bathers with a Turtle (1908), Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
The Dance (painting)|La Danse (1909)
Still Life with Geraniums (1910)
L'Atelier Rouge (1911)
The Conversation (painting) (1908–1912)
Zorah on the Terrace (1912)
Le Rifain assis (1912)
Window at Tangier (1912)
Le rideau jaune (the yellow curtain) (1915)
The Window (1916), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
The Painter and His Model (1916–17)
The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay (1917), Cleveland Museum of Art
La leçon de musique (1917)
Interior A Nice (1920)
Festival of Flowers, Nice (1923), Cleveland Museum of Art
Odalisque with Raised Arms (1923), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Yellow Odalisque (1926)
The Dance II (1932), triptych mural (45ft by 15ft) in the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia
Robe violette et Anémones (1937)
Woman in a Purple Coat (1937)
Le Rêve de 1940 (the dream of 1940) (1940)
La Blouse Roumaine (1940)
Interior with an Etruscan Vase (1940), Cleveland Museum of Art
Le Lanceur De Couteaux (1943)
Annelies, White Tulips and Anemones (1944), Honolulu Museum of Art
L'Asie (1946)
Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge (1947)
Jazz (Henri Matisse)|Jazz (1947)
The Plum Blossoms (1948)
Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire (1948–1951)
Beasts of the Sea (1950)
Facial-maschera (red)|Facial-maschera (1951)
The Sorrows of the King (1952)
Black Leaf on Green Background (1952)
La Négresse (1952)
Blue Nude II (1952)
The Snail (1953)
Le Bateau (1954) This gouache created a minor stir when the MoMA mistakenly displayed it upside-down for 47 days in 1961.