Henri Matisse

Life

Style & Innovation

The revolution Matisse brought to the history of art can be summed up in a single sentence — he released color from its duty to describe objects. Until then, color had been the slave of local color: leaves are green, flesh is pink. Matisse turned color into an autonomous means of expression. When he laid a band of green across a face or painted a shadow red, it was not because that was how things looked, but because the balance and feeling that color created within the picture demanded it. "Expression," he wrote, "does not lie in the passion glowing on a face or in a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive — the place the figures occupy, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays its part" (Notes of a Painter, 1908). Planes of color, flatness, decorative rhythm, and the arabesque were his vocabulary; and in his later years he went so far as to invent the cut-out, cutting colored paper with scissors to fuse "drawing" (form) and "painting" (color) into a single gesture.

Within this exhibition's seven-section narrative, Matisse is the central figure of the fifth chapter, "Fauvism — the Liberation of Color." Having traveled from Courbet's Realism (Section 1) through the light of Impressionism (Renoir and Degas, Section 2), the emotion and structure of Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh and Cézanne, Section 3), and Symbolism (Section 4), the visitor arrives at Matisse to witness color finally break the last chain of imitating nature. Matisse himself kept Cézanne and Van Gogh on his own walls and fed on them, which makes Section 3 his direct prehistory. And his experiments with color lead straight into the Cubism of Picasso and Braque in Section 6 (the dismantling of form), and on to the abstraction of Kandinsky in Section 7 (Painting Study for 'White Form', 1913). Matisse and Picasso are often called the twin poles of twentieth-century art — one reinvented painting through color, the other through form. The two first met in 1906 at Gertrude Stein's salon and became lifelong rivals and the colleagues who understood each other most deeply. The fact that in 1922, in a single year, the DIA acquired both Matisse's The Window and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) as the "first in any American museum" stands as a symbol of the pioneering eye behind the modernist collection this exhibition reveals.

Technique

Standing before a Matisse canvas, you should look first not at "what is depicted" but at "how the planes of color are woven together." First, the color plane. He often painted color broad and flat, with brushstrokes scarcely visible, turning the picture into a decorative surface. Unlike the small dots and touches of Impressionism, Matisse's color frequently spreads like a "wide field" enclosed by contour lines. Second, complementary contrast. He places green beside red, orange beside blue, so the colors push against each other and vibrate. As Matisse himself described The Window (1916) — "the painting is in green and white, with a few accents: the blue of the forget-me-nots, the red zigzag of the rug, and the red table" — look for the handful of strong color notes (blue, red) lodged among the calmer planes.

Second, look for "traces of reworking." Matisse may seem a genius of improvisation, but he was in fact a painter who reworked endlessly. He would scrape down and repaint the same surface for months on end (the Large Reclining Nude / Pink Nude (1935, Baltimore Museum of Art) recorded its revisions across 22 photographs), and conservation science (X-ray and infrared reflectography) frequently reveals figures and alternate compositions that vanished beneath his pictures (MoMA's study of The Red Studio is a famous example). Works from the "severe, experimental period" around 1916 use gray, black, and blue-green forcefully and contain many areas thickly repainted, so before the actual canvas, view the surface at a raking angle and look for the ridges of earlier paint layers, the marks where contours were shifted, and the fine grain where the paint was scraped away.

Third, the physical nature of the medium. The Window is an oil painting, but two things are key: that Matisse began using black so actively after Morocco in 1912–13, and the architectural framework that divides the picture into "inside and outside." His late cut-outs were made from paper that assistants coated evenly in gouache, which Matisse then cut in a single stroke with scissors and pinned in place; the scissor-cut edges of the paper and the faint shadows where the colored sheets overlap are the very essence of this medium that is "painting and sculpture at once." Finally, because Matisse regarded how a work appears within a wall and a space (its placement) as part of its expression, stepping back in the gallery and taking in the "rhythm" of the whole field of color at a single glance comes closest to his own intention.

Key Works

Behind the Canvas

Connections

In this exhibition Matisse, as leader of Fauvism (Section 5), takes charge of the stage called "the liberation of color." His direct prehistory is the Post-Impressionism of Section 3 — without Van Gogh's emotional color and Cézanne's structure of color planes, there would have been no pure color in Matisse (he in fact kept Cézanne's Three Bathers on his own wall as a lifelong inspiration). His fellow Fauve André Derain (also in Section 5) completed the revolution of color with him at Collioure in 1905. Matisse's experiments with color lead straight into the Cubism of Picasso and Braque in Section 6 (the dismantling of form), and on to the abstraction of Kandinsky in Section 7 (Painting Study for 'White Form', 1913), which renders painting wholly non-objective. "Matisse of color / Picasso of form" are the two poles of twentieth-century art; meeting at Gertrude Stein's salon in 1906, they became lifelong rivals and colleagues. At the level of the DIA, the event in which it acquired both Matisse's The Window and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Straw Hat in the single year 1922, the first in any American museum, links the two artists in one line.

Did You Know