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Biography GERMAN

Matisse, Henri
born: 1869 le cateau-Cambresis, France
died: 1954 Cimiez, near Nice

The small Fauvist picture Seated Girl was painted in igog, as Henri Matisse was gradually beginning to receive public recognition. After law studies and attendance at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Matisse was initially influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He broke away from these models in igo5, during one of his many sojourns on the Mediterranean. "In Collioure," Matisse recorded, "I began to concern myself with a theory, or fixed idea, of Vuillard's, the absolute application of color... This helped me very much, because I had a definite idea about the colors of an object. I put my first colar down on the canvas, then a second one next to it, and then, instead ' of taking it away again if it did not seem to conform with the fiirst, I added a third color that agreed with both. That went on until I had the feeling of having achieved a perfect harmony in my picture." The first Fauvist paintings, shown in 1905 at the Salon des Independants, caused an outcry of derision, but they also attracted the attention of collectors and critics, one ofwhom invented the label Fauves (Savages, or Wild Beasts). Our painting of a girl sitting to the artist illustrates the Fauves' intention to cleanse motifs of content and reduce them to pure form - pure line, pure color, pure plane. This maxim, formulated by Matisse as the "wildest" of the Fauves, is put into practice here. Almost no attention seems to be paid to characterizing the space, the textures of materials, the atmosphere, the direction of the light source, or characteristic traits of the figure. The work is ornamental to an unusual degree; the corporeality of the seated figure is hardly suggested by the forms and colors, which exist for their own sakes. As this implies, the colors themselves are given the task of defining the pictorial space, something Matisse admired in the work of Vincent van Gogh and Pau) Cezanne especially. The expansive planes of color in Seated Girl serve to (end stability to the composition. In the course of his later development Matisse began to dispense with certain of these Fauvist features. Agitated brushwork and the visible marks it left gradually disappeared from the color fields and contours. Matisse began to juxtapose great planes of homogeneous color, frequently accented by continuous, ornamental arabesques of line, and accompanied by compositional elements of an increasingly geometric character. In addition to painting and printmaking, the artist now turned to other techniques, such as sculpture, glass-painting, wall decorations, and designs in applied art. During the late phase of his career, Matisse also experimented with paper cutouts. A representative example of this series is the collage Women and Monkeys (1952). Although Matisse had earlier designed paintings with the aid of cutouts, it was not until 1943 to 1950 that the technique developed into an autonomous art form. Taking large sheets of white paper, Matisse covered them with colored gouache, then cut various shapes out of the paper and arranged and pasted them on a white ground. "The cutout enables me to draw in color," Matisse remarked. "It represents a simplification for me. Instead of drawing a contour and filling it in with color - whereby the one alters the other - I draw directly in color. .. This simpliFcation guarantees a precise merger of the two means, which become one. I by no means recommend this form of expression for the purpose of practice. It is a result, not a point of departure. It is predicated on infinite subtlety and long experience." Matisse called this method "drawing with the scissors." The resulting compositions are airy, graceful, delightful and sublime at once. Originally Women and Monkeys was designed for Matisse's room at the Hotel Regina in Nice. It was much smaller in format, consisting only of the seated female figures and pomegranates. Later, when Matisse executed the large frieze The Swimming Pool, he altered the present cornposition with an eye to hanging it above the door of his room. He added the two monkeys at left and right, and also altered the female nudes and the number and arrangement of the pomegranates - a symbol of fertility, love and immorality since antiquity. In order to lend rhythm to the composition, Matisse also changed the position of the arrns and legs, making them describe an ornamental, wavy movement. The highly abstracted figurative symbols of these cutouts - female nudes, fruit, flowers, exotic birds, dancers, acrobats, and sirens - emerged from an imaginative realm in which heaven and earth merge and time seems to stand still. In 1952, the year in which Women and Monkeys was done, the artist summed up his achievement by saying, "I have arrived at a form distilled to the essence, and of the object, which I earlier depicted in the fullness of its volume, I retain only a sign." Women and Monkeys is a work from the artist's final years in which an earthly paradise full of happiness andjoie de vivre is evoked with sublime insouciance.

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