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Fauvism

By-Thakur Dhirendranath

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasizedpainterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.^[1][2] The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.^[1]

Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Jean Metzinger, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso's partner inCubism).^[1]

The paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction.^[3] Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism ofSeurat^[3] and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne^[4] and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905.^[5] In 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier:^[6]

Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher;^[7] a controversial professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a Symbolist painter, he taught Matisse, Marquet, Manguin, Rouault and Camoin during the 1890s, and was viewed by critics as the group's philosophical leader until Matisse was recognized as such in 1904.^[8] Moreau's broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the expressive potency of pure color was inspirational for his students.^[9] Matisse said of him, "He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency."^[9] This source of empathy was taken away with Moreau's death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development.^[9]

In 1896, Matisse, then an unknown art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off Brittany.^[10] Russell was anImpressionist painter; Matisse had never previously seen an Impressionist work directly, and was so shocked at the style that he left after ten days, saying, "I couldn't stand it any more."^[10] The next year he returned as Russell's student and abandoned his earth-colored palette for bright Impressionist colors, later stating, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me."^[10] Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing.^[10]

In 1901, Maurice de Vlaminck encountered the work of Van Gogh for the first time at an exhibition, declaring soon after that he loved Van Gogh more than his own father; he started to work by squeezing paint directly onto the canvas from the tube.^[9] In parallel with the artists' discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre-Renaissance French art, which was shown in a 1904 exhibition, French Primitives.^[9]Another aesthetic influence was African sculpture, of which Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse were early collectors.^[9]

Many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisse's painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupté ("Luxury, Calm and Pleasure"), which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.^[9]

After viewing the boldly colored canvases of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, the criticLouis Vauxcelles disparaged the painters as "fauves" (wild beasts), thus giving their movement the name by which it became known, Fauvism. The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. The group gained their name after Vauxcelles described their show of work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.^[12] Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited near Matisse's work and may have had an influence on the pejorative used.^[13] Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage.^[12][14] The pictures gained considerable condemnation—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", wrote the critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945)—but also some favorable attention.^[12] The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat; this work's purchase by Gertrude and Leo Stein had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.^[12] Matisse's Neo-Impressionist landscape, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, had already been exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905.^[15]

Henri Matisse

By- Thakur Dhirendranath

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (French: [ɑ̃ʁi matis]; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.^[1] Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.^[2][3][4][5] Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.^[6] 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.^[7]

Early life and education

Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France, the oldest son of a prosperous grain merchant.^[8] He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack ofappendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it,^[9] and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father.^[10][11] In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still-lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists such as Édouard Manet, and by Japanese art. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired; as an art student he made copies of four of Chardin's paintings in the Louvre.^[12]

In 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him toImpressionism and to the work of van Gogh, who had been a friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me."^[11] In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state.^[13]With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse.^[14]

In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica.^[15] Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy,^[16] and Jules Flandrin.^[17] Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, and Cézanne's Three Bathers. In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration.^[16]

Many of Matisse's paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signac's essay, "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-impressionisme".^[15] His paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, completing The Slave in 1903.^[18]

Fauvism

Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.^[19][20]The leaders of the movement were Matisse and André Derain.^[19] Matisse's first solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1904,^[16] without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.^[15] In that year he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme et Volupté.^[15] In 1905 he travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure. His paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, and use pointillism in a less rigorous way than before.

Matisse and a group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The paintings expressed emotion with wild, often dissonant colours, without regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse showed Open Window and Woman with the Hat at the Salon. Critic Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the phrase "Donatello parmi les fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.^[21] His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage.^[19][21] The exhibition garnered harsh criticism—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille Mauclair—but also some favourable attention.^[21] When the painting that was singled out for special condemnation, Matisse's Woman with a Hat, was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, the embattled artist's morale improved considerably.^[21]

Matisse was recognised as a leader of the Fauves, along with André Derain; the two were friendly rivals, each with his own followers. Other members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Symbolist painterGustave Moreau (1826–1898) was the movement's inspirational teacher; as a professor at the École des Beaux-Artsin Paris, he pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.

In 1907 Guillaume Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, wrote, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."^[22] But Matisse's work of the time also encountered vehement criticism, and it was difficult for him to provide for his family.^[11] His painting Nu bleu (1907) was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913.^[23]

The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did not affect the career of Matisse; many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in, with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. He continued to absorb new influences: he travelled to Algeria in 1906 studying African art and Primitivism; after viewing a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, he spent two months in Spain studying Moorish art. He visited Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913 and while painting in Tangiers he made several changes to his work, including his use of black as a colour.^[24][25][26] The effect on Matisse's art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in L'Atelier Rouge (1911).^[15]

Matisse had a long association with the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin. He created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission, the other painting being Music, 1910. An earlier version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Selected works: Paris, 1901–1910

Luxembourg Gardens, 1901,

Dishes and Fruit, 1901 

·         Nu (Carmelita), 1904, oil on canvas, 81.3 x 59 cm 

·         Open Window, Collioure, 1905,National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 

Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line), 1905,   

Landscape at Collioure, 1905, oil on canvas, 38.8 x 46.6 cm.,Museum of Modern Art 

Around April 1906 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years younger than Matisse.^[11] The two became lifelong friends as well as rivals and are often compared; one key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realised interiors. Matisse and Picasso were first brought together at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Americans in Paris— Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah—were important collectors and supporters of Matisse's paintings. In addition Gertrude Stein's two American friends from Baltimore, the Cone sisters Claribel and Etta, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their paintings and drawings. The Cone collection is now exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art.^[28]

While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the walls at 27 rue de Fleurus. Where Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso's works dominated Leo and Gertrude Stein's collection, Sarah Stein's collection particularly emphasised Matisse.^[29]

Contemporaries of Leo and Gertrude Stein, Matisse and Picasso became part of their social circle and routinely joined the gatherings that took place on Saturday evenings at 27 rue de Fleurus. Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, remarking:

·          

After Paris

In 1917 Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. His work of the decade or so following this relocation shows a relaxation and a softening of his approach. This "return to order" is characteristic of much art of the post-World War I period, and can be compared with theneoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky, and the return to traditionalism of Derain. His orientalist odalisque paintings are characteristic of the period; while this work was popular, some contemporary critics found it shallow and decorative.^[36]

In the late 1920s Matisse once again engaged in active collaborations with other artists. He worked with not only Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, and Spaniards, but also a few Americans and recent American immigrants.

After 1930 a new vigor and bolder simplification appeared in his work. American art collector Albert C. Barnes convinced him to produce a large mural for theBarnes Foundation, The Dance II, which was completed in 1932; the Foundation owns several dozen other Matisse paintings. This move toward simplification and a foreshadowing of the cutout technique are also evident in his painting Large Reclining Nude (1935). Matisse worked on this painting over a period of several months and documented the progress with a series of 22 photographs which he sent to Etta Cone.^[37]

The war years

He and his wife of 41 years separated in 1939. In 1941, he underwent surgery in which a colostomy was performed. Afterwards he started using a wheelchair, and until his death he was cared for by a Russian woman, Lydia Delektorskaya, formerly one of his models. With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés. His Blue Nudes series feature prime examples of this technique he called "painting with scissors"; they demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power.In the 1940s he also worked as a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over one hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.In 1941, a nursing student named Monique Bourgeois responded to an ad placed by Matisse for a nurse. A platonic friendship developed between Matisse and Bourgeois. He discovered that she was an amateur artist, and taught her about perspective. After Bourgeois left the position, Matisse sometimes contacted her to request that she model for him. Bourgeois became a Dominican nun in 1946.Matisse was much admired and repeatedly referred to by the Greek Nobelist poet Odysseas Elytis. Elytis was introduced to Matisse through their common friend Tériade, during the work on the Cutouts. Matisse had painted the wall of the dining room of Tériade's residence, the Villa Natacha in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, which Elytis also mentioned in his poems.Matisse, thoroughly unpolitical, was shocked when he heard that his daughter Marguerite, who had been active in the Résistance during the war, was tortured (almost to death) in a Rennes prison and sentenced to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.^[10] (Marguerite avoided further imprisonment by escaping from the Ravensbrück-bound train, which was halted during an Allied air strike; she survived in the woods until rescued by fellow resisters.^[38])

Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.^[39][40]

In 1947 he published Jazz, a limited-edition artist's book of about one hundred prints of colourful paper cut collages, accompanied by his written thoughts. Tériade, a noted twentieth-century art publisher, arranged to have Matisse's cutouts rendered as pochoir (stencil) prints.

In 1951 Matisse finished a four-year project of designing the interior, the glass windows and the decorations of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, often referred to as the Matisse Chapel. This project was the result of the close friendship between Matisse and Bourgeois, now Sister Jacques-Marie, despite him being an atheist.^[41][42] They had met again in Vence and started the collaboration, a story related in her 1992 bookHenri Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence and in the 2003 documentary "A Model for Matisse".^[43]

In 1952 he established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, and this museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France.

According to David Rockefeller, Matisse's final work was the design for a stained-glass window installed at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills near the Rockefeller estate north of New York City. "It was his final artistic creation; the maquette was on the wall of his bedroom when he died in November of 1954", Rockefeller writes. Installation was completed in 1956.^[44]

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.^[45]

His The Plum Blossoms (1948) was purchased on 8 September 2005, for the Museum of Modern Art by Henry Kravis and the new president of the museum, Marie-Josée Drouin. Estimated price was US$25 million. Previously, it had not been seen by the public since 1970.^[46] In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US$9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse's daughter Marguerite often aided Matisse scholars with insights about his working methods and his works. She died in 1982 while compiling a catalogue of her father's work.^[47]

Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, (1900–1989) opened a modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s. The Pierre Matisse Gallery which was active from 1931 until 1989 represented and exhibited many European artists and a few Americans and Canadians in New York often for the first time. He exhibited Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, André Derain, Yves Tanguy, Le Corbusier, Paul Delvaux, Wifredo Lam, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Balthus, Leonora Carrington, Zao Wou Ki, Sam Francis, sculptors Theodore Roszak, Raymond Mason and Reg Butler, and several other important artists, including the work of Henri Matisse.^[48][49]