Law clerk turned Fauve who made color the whole argument
Henri Matisse, 31 December 1869 to 3 November 1954, stands with Picasso as a shaper of early twentieth-century art. Between 1900 and 1905 blazing canvases earned the wild beasts sneer; afterward flattened color fields kept rewriting what painting could be for half a century.
Matisse was the eldest son of a prosperous grain dealer, born in Le Cateau-Cambresis in France's far north on New Year's Eve 1869 and raised in Bohain-en-Vermandois. He trained in law in Paris from 1887 and then worked as a court administrator back home. Painting arrived by accident in 1889, when his mother gave him art materials while he recovered from appendicitis; he later described what he found as a kind of paradise. By 1891 he was back in Paris studying under Bouguereau at the Academie Julian and Gustave Moreau at the Beaux-Arts, turning out competent, conventional still lifes.
The pivot came in 1896 on Belle Ile, where the Australian painter John Russell, a friend of Van Gogh, explained colour theory, showed him Impressionism and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse dropped his earthy palette for bright hues and later named Russell as his teacher. Pissarro sent him to London in 1898 to look at Turner. In 1902 his wife Amelie's parents were caught up in the Humbert fraud scandal, and he found himself supporting a household of seven.
His first solo show, at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1904, did poorly, but a summer painting in St. Tropez with Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross intensified his colour. At the 1905 Salon d'Automne he hung The Open Window and Woman with a Hat among like-minded friends, and the critic Louis Vauxcelles quipped about Donatello among the wild beasts, giving the Fauves their name. He and Andre Derain led the group, friendly rivals, while Braque, Dufy and Vlaminck joined in. Resistance ran deep: in 1913 his Blue Nude was burned in effigy when the Armory Show reached Chicago.
Some of his strongest pictures came between 1906 and 1917. He visited Algeria in 1906, met Picasso, eleven years younger, around April that year, and painted La Danse and Music for the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin in 1910. In 1917 he settled near Nice, where a looser manner in the 1920s won him praise as a guardian of French classicism.
Source: Henri Matisse
