Revolutionary years of Henri Matisse

During 1898 Paul Signac, the theoretician and actively proselytizing leader (after the death of Georges Seurat) of the Neo-Impressionists, or pointillists, published in the literary review La Revue Blanche his principal manifesto, “D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme.” Matisse, back in Paris in 1899, read the articles and, without turning into an immediate convert, became interested in the pointillist idea of obtaining additive mixtures of color on the retina by means of juxtaposed dots (points in French) on the canvas. He furthered his research into new techniques by buying, from the well-known modernist dealer Ambroise Vollard, a painting by Cézanne, The Three Bathers; one by Gauguin, Boy’s Head; and a drawing by van Gogh. Often accompanied by his close friend Albert Marquet, who was also interested in the problem of pure color, he began to paint outdoor scenes in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in suburban Arcueil, and from the open window of his apartment overlooking the Seine.

Matisse also purchased from Vollard the plaster model of the bust of Henri Rochefort by Auguste Rodin, and during 1899 he began to attend an evening class in sculpture. His early work in three dimensions, the first of some 60 pieces he executed during his lifetime, reveals the influence not only of Rodin but also of Antoine-Louis Barye, generally considered the greatest French sculptor of animals.

After 1899 Matisse ceased to exhibit at the Salon and gradually became a familiar figure in the Parisian circles where modern art was being produced and ardently discussed. In 1901 he showed for the first time in the juryless, eclectic Salon des Indépendants, which had been founded in 1884 as a refuge for painters unacceptable to the official exhibition juries. In 1902 he was in a group show at the small gallery of Berthe Weill, and the next year he and a number of his old classmates from Moreau’s atelier and the Académie Carrière were the progressive contingent in the liberal, newly created Salon d’Automne. But in spite of such recognition, he was often on the brink of financial disaster. In 1900 he was obliged to accept work on the decoration of the Grand Palais, which was being erected to house part of the new Exposition Universelle in the Champs-Élysées quarter. His wife opened a dress shop in the hope of helping to make ends meet. In 1901 an attack of bronchitis forced him to take a long rest. During part of 1902 he had to return to Bohain with his three children—Marguerite, Jean, and Pierre—and Mme Matisse. He was past 34 when, in June 1904, at Vollard’s gallery, he had his first one-man show, and it was a failure.

Matisse spent the summer of 1905 with André Derain at Collioure, a small French fishing port on the Mediterranean, near the Spanish border. In the dazzling sunshine he rapidly freed himself from what he called “the tyranny” of pointillism. The carefully placed little dabs required by the additive-mixture approach turned into swirls and slabs of spontaneous brushwork, and the theoretically realistic colors exploded into an emotional display of complementaries: red against green, orange against blue, and yellow against violet. Representative of this new freedom were Open Window, Collioure, which was finished at Collioure, and Woman with Hat, a portrait of his wife painted back in Paris in September. That fall the two pictures were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne alongside works by a number of artists who also had been experimenting with violent color. The Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles called the group les fauves (“the wild beasts”), and thus Fauvism, the first of the important “isms” in 20th-century painting, was born. Almost immediately Matisse became its acknowledged leader.

Almost immediately, too, his financial situation altered for the better. The Stein family in Paris—Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and the latter’s wife, Sarah—became Matisse collectors. In 1906 the artist had a show at the Galerie Druet in Paris in addition to exhibiting again at the Salons des Indépendants and d’Automne. In 1907 a group of admirers, who included Sarah Stein and Hans Purrmann, organized for him a Left Bank art school, in which he taught off and on until 1911. In 1908 he exhibited in New York City, Moscow, and Berlin.

Fauvism was too undisciplined to last long, and soon its adherents were moving, according to their temperaments, toward Expressionism, Cubism, or some kind of neo-traditionalism. Matisse had no liking for these directions, and if “Fauve” is taken to mean simply a painter with a passion for pure color, he can be said to have remained one all his life. He had, however, too much rationalism in his outlook not to wish for some order in a stylistic situation that threatened to become chaotic, and his search for chromatic equilibrium and linear economy can be followed in a series of major works produced between the revelation of Fauvism in 1905 and the end of World War I. In 1906 he painted Joy of Life; in 1908, Red Room (Harmony in Red); in 1911, The Red Studio; in 1915, Goldfish; in 1916, Piano Lesson; and in 1918, Montalban, Large Landscape.

In such works, the list of which should be much longer, the main characteristics of Matisse’s mature painting style recur constantly. The forms tend to be outlined in flowing, heavy contours and to have few interior details; the color is laid on in large, thin, luminous, carefully calculated patches; shadows are practically eliminated; and the depicted space is either extremely shallow or warped into a flatness that parallels the plane of the canvas and defies academic rules for perspective and foreshortening. The total effect, although too intense and freehand to be merely decorative, may recall the patterns of the rugs, textiles, and ceramics. The choice and treatment of subject matter imply optimism, hedonism, intelligence, a fastidious sensuality, and, in spite of the many studies of both clothed and unclothed women, scarcely a trace of conventional sentiment.