Who is matisse the painter

A lover of all art, he immersed himself in the work of his fellow painters, and often got himself into debt buying the work of other artists.

He received much inspiration from the work of other artists as well, drawing inspiration from such varied sources as Japanese art, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Pointillism.

Due to vehement hatred of his works, his Blue Nude was burned in at an Armory Exhibition in Chicago. Although he had harsh critics, he had loving followers, including Gertrude Stein and her family. Throughout the years of , his friends organized and financed an art school, Academie Matisse, in which Matisse could instruct young artists.

In his later life, Matisse, who was partially reliant on a wheelchair, continued his artistic endeavors in creating cut paper collages, and working as a graphic artist. He also published Jazz in , a collection of his printed and written works. Before his death of a heart attack, he established a museum of his own works, which has helped establish his legacy as a leading figure in the modern art movement. 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. Along with Picasso, Matisse helped to define and influence radical contemporary art in the 20th century. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve wild beast , by the s he was being hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.

His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. He first started to paint in , after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. The scene is made up of independent motifs arranged to form a complete composition.

Critics noted its new style -- broad fields of color and linear figures, a clear rejection of Paul Signac's celebrated Pointillism. Matisse was working on a sculpture, Reclining Nude I , when he accidentally damaged the piece.

Before repairing it, he painted it in blue against a background of palm fronds. She is also a deliberate response to nudes seen in the Paris Salon - ugly and hard rather than soft and pretty. This was the last Matisse painting bought by Leo and Gertrude Stein. Although Matisse is known above all as a painter, sculpture was also important to him, and he was particularly inspired by Auguste Rodin, whom he visited in his studio in The Back I is the first of a series of four large relief sculptures that Matisse worked on between and , all of which are significantly innovative.

Conventionally, the background of a relief sculpture is regarded as a virtual plane, a kind of imaginary space that the viewer fills in with his own notions. But in The Back series, Matisse suggested that the backdrop was fashioned from the same heavy material as the figure itself.

Throughout the series, the figure is progressively simplified and further identified with the background. Matisse planned this picture as early as , and it recalls visits made to Morocco around this time.

A figure sits on the right with a back to us, fruit lies in the left foreground, and a mosque rises in the background beyond a terrace. Matisse said that he occasionally used black in his pictures in order to simplify the composition, though here it undoubtedly also recalls the stark shadows produced by the strong sunshine in the region. Although it employs the same brilliant color as much of Matisse's work, its use of abstract motifs and rigid diagrammatic composition is unusual, and has attracted considerable speculation.

Rather than use the scene as an opportunity for decoration, it is as if Matisse has tried to find the means to chart and map it.

Matisse regarded this picture as one of the most important in his career, and it is certainly one of his most puzzling. He worked on it at intervals over eight years, and it passed through a variety of transformations. The painting evolved out of a commission from Matisse's Russian patron, Sergei Shchuckin, for two decorative panels on the subjects of dance and music, and, initially, the scheme for the picture resembled the idyllic scenes he had previously depicted in paintings such as Joy of Life However, his transformations gradually turned it into more of a confrontation with Cubism, and it is for this reason that the picture has been the subject of intense scrutiny.

Although Matisse rejected Cubism, he certainly felt challenged by it, and this picture - along with many he painted from to - seems to be influenced by the style, since it is very unlike his previous, more decorative work. It is far more concerned with faithful representation of the structure of the human figure, and its position in space.

The painting might be compared to The Backs series , which also preoccupied Matisse the years he was working on Bathers , since both address the problem of depicting a three-dimensional figure against a flat background. Matisse created a maquette for the mural out of cut paper, which he could rearrange as he determined the composition.

However, the finished work was too small for the space due to being given incorrect measurements. Rather than add a decorative border, Matisse decided to recompose the entire piece, resulting in a dynamic composition, in which bodies seem to leap across abstracted space of pink and blue fields.

Matisse completed a series of four blue nudes in , each in his favorite pose of entwined legs and raised arm. Matisse had been making cut-outs for eleven years, but had not yet seriously attempted to portray the human figure.

In preparation for these works, Matisse filled a notebook with studies. He then created a figure that is abstracted and simplified, a symbol for the nude, before incorporating the nude into his large-scale murals. Content compiled and written by Julia Brucker , Alexandra Duncan. Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors. And right after this, he became involved in exploring Cubism in his own painting. But even in opposition, as in these two portraits, the dialogue between the two artists was clear.

Sometimes, however, it was more subtle. Matisse had done the sets and costumes for a Diaghilev ballet a few years before, which irked Picasso when he heard about it.

A balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it! The visual analogies are obvious: they both distort the classic theme of the Three Graces, that trio of Greek goddesses who dispense charm and beauty.

The Three Dancers , like the Demoiselles , was a kind of exorcism. By the s, the two painters had drifted apart. Matisse was ensconced in a hotel in Nice painting luxurious odalisques and drawing portraits of women in plumed hats. But even then they kept an eye on each other.

In the late s Picasso fell in love with Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman almost Grecian in her grace. To paint her, Picasso found himself borrowing the more flowing lines, rounded figures and vivid colors of Matisse. For his part, Matisse continued to distill the luminosity of Nice in his paintings.

Nice is so beautiful! Alight so soft and tender, despite its brilliance. Matisse, in ill health, defended Picasso against his critics. He is living in Paris quietly, has no wish to sell, asks for nothing. Yet both men were far too prickly to keep their peace. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other.

Some of these were huge, others small enough for him to manage from bed. When a Dominican priest invited him in to design a chapel in the town of Vence, he prepared some of the images for the stained-glass windows and wall decorations by cutting out paper. Picasso, too, took up a pair of shears. He made a series of sculptures that look like paper cutouts, though they are of sheet metal.

And his paintings seemed to take on a Matissean simplicity of form, even a decorative exuberance. In retrospect, one should have seen this coming. There were even earlier hints. Picasso and then Matisse took this from a low level, a hidden technique, and put it out front, on the surface, in the art itself.

And that is a major part of modern art.