This Artist Compared Good Art to a Comfortable Armchair
The curation of this content is at the discretion of the author, and non necessarily reflective of the views of Encyclopaedia Britannica or its editorial staff. For the most accurate and up-to-appointment information, consult individual encyclopedia entries near the topics.
In 1909 Henri Matisse said, "The painter no longer has to preoccupy himself with details. The photo is there to render the multitude of details a hundred times better and more than rapidly. Plastic class will present emotion equally directly as possible and by the simplest means." He grabbed that liberty and became known equally the great colorist of the 20th century whose influence was broad-reaching. Read on to discover the stories behind 5 of the artist's most fascinating masterpieces.
Earlier versions of the descriptions of these paintings offset appeared in1001 Paintings You Must Run across Earlier You lot Die, edited past Stephen Farthing (2018). Writers' names announced in parentheses.
-
The Rocaille Armchair (1946)
After Earth War II ended, Henri Matisse returned from Paris where he institute himself fêted as a symbol of a gratuitous France. The septuagenarian settled in his southern villa for the winter and painted The Rocaille Armchair. Matisse uses the bright colors and simplified forms typical of his mode to convert a article of furniture into a vivid ii-dimensional image. The rocaille, named for its feature forms that imitate the natural curved shapes of rocks and shells, was adult during the 18th century. Matisse exaggerates the chair'due south curvaceous armrests and paints them vivid green—they morph into a groovy serpentine form, which wraps around the back of the chair. At the time, Matisse was also experimenting with collages, and we tin most imagine the creative person breaking down the representation of his armchair into a few yellow and green shapes, cutting them out and pasting them onto a red piece of newspaper. This simplicity of depiction places no barrier of illusion between the viewer and the object: it is at one time figurative and abstruse. Matisse sees the armchair not as an object to be looked at and evaluated from a detached, clinical distance but rather as something to be felt, experienced, and viewed creatively. In contrast to the dour prospects of postwar Europe, the warmth and imaginativeness of Matisse'southward art spoke a message of hope for those who would listen. The painting is part of the drove of the Musée Matisse in Nice. (Daniel Robert Koch)
-
Bluish Nude Three (1952–53)
The highly original serial of four Blue Nudes created by Henri Matisse during the menses 1952–54 was built-in from a combination of tradition and experiment. Blue Nude III, which is in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, represents a definitive stage on Matisse'due south journey toward abstraction while remaining recognizably representative of the man form.
The color blue signified distance and book to Matisse. Frustrated in his attempts to successfully marry dominant and contrasting tones, he was moved to employ solid slabs of single color early on in his career, a technique that became known as Fauvism. The painted gouache cut-outs that comprise the Blueish Nudes were inspired by Matisse'due south collection of African sculpture and a visit that he made to Tahiti in 1930. It took some other twenty years and a menstruation of incapacity after an operation earlier Matisse synthesized these influences into this seminal series. The artist found the procedure of arranging cut-out sections of painted gouache far more manageable than working straight with paint on canvas. He named the procedure "cartoon in paper," and the definition of the figure is institute in the spaces betwixt the cut-outs. The effect is almost that of a relief, but in two dimensions. Every bit a culmination of Matisse's long search for a perfect blend of color and form, the Blue Nudes stand for an ending of sorts. Yet, in their originality they led to new beginnings for Matisse's successors. French artists of the 1960s, such as Claude Viallat, and American abstractionists, such as Mark Rothko, congenital on the foundations laid by Matisse and won great acclamation in their own right. (Dan Dunlavey)
-
Trip the light fantastic toe I (1909)
This huge painting by Henri Matisse is the full-size study for a piece of work commissioned past the Russian material baron Sergei Shchukin. Shchukin was Matisse's greatest patron long before the hitting colors and radically simplified forms of Matisse'south work were widely appreciated in his native France.
Matisse was born in northern France; he worked as a lawyer's clerk before an set on of appendicitis changed his life. While convalescing Matisse began to paint and he moved to Paris in 1891 to become an creative person. In 1908 Matisse published the commodity "Notes of a Painter," which describes the essence of his art. "The whole organization of my paintings is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty space…everything plays its part," he wrote. The motif of a circumvolve of dancers had been used by artists since classical times, and it was a theme to which Matisse returned throughout his career.
As in Trip the light fantastic toe II (1910), the dancers in Dance I are painted in apartment color and set up against flat areas of blue for the sky and dark-green for the hill. Stretched across the sail, almost bursting out of it, the dancers course a circular pattern of rhythmic movement. Where two outstretched hands do not quite affect, Matisse creates a sense of dynamic tension. When first seen in 1910, the concluding version of Dance I was criticized for its flatness, lack of perspective, and crudeness of course. However, in its revolutionary use of color, line, and class lay the seeds of two important movements of 20th-century painting: Expressionism and Abstractionism. It is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York City. (Jude Welton)
-
The Red Studio (1911)
Henri Matisse is known as the cracking colorist of the 20th century, and The Cherry Studio is ane of the best examples of this talent. An exhibition of Islamic fine art, which Matisse saw in Munich in 1911, inspired a serial of interiors swamped with a single color. The subjects of the fine art on display in the room are less important than the fact that they operate as patterns on the surface. Ane or two objects overlap, but on the whole they be every bit individual artifacts connected past red paint. But it would be a error to think of this painting as simply an exploration of the colour red. It is principally a painting about the act of painting. The article of furniture is but suggested—it barely exists. Because of their colour, only the paintings depicted in the image—his own paintings—have a sense of tangibility. The nudes lead the centre around the room from left to right, ending in a deep curl incorporating the chair (a symbolic nude) and the pinkish nudes leaning against the chest. It is only possible to read this every bit a room considering of the window and the angle of the table and chair, which advise recession, and the propped-up painting on the left, to a higher place which everything flattens out. The only obvious reference to the production of art is an open box of crayons. Instead, it is the idea of painting that is suggested, by assuasive an empty frame to capture a portion of the red. Matisse's obvious successor was Mark Rothko, who acknowledged his debt after making daily pilgrimages to come across The Red Studio when it was installed at the Museum of Mod Art in New York City in 1949. (Wendy Osgerby)
-
The Piano Lesson (1916)
Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history's ugliest eras. Inside his lifetime there were two world wars, fell international ideological rivalries, and relentless urbanization through industry, but Matisse turned a blind heart to these explosive social changes. Different his as influential peer and rival, Pablo Picasso, the French Cubist pioneer'southward impact on art and history was more stylistic than sociological. Yet despite distancing his work from the issues surrounding him, his iconic experiments in cartoon, painting, graphic art, book analogy, and sculpture permanently altered the course of modernistic fine art and visual culture.
Nearing abstraction only marked mainly by an adherence to geometric forms and austere color pairings, the collagelike assembly of color patches in The Piano Lesson marked an entirely new management for Matisse. The prototype's literal field of study matter depicts a young boy struggling to concentrate at a pianoforte as his mother hovers behind. An open window above him seductively reveals a distracting slice of nature greenish. Open windows were a recurring motif in Matisse's work, withal here the painting'south somber hues and sense of introspection undermine the window's soothing symbolism. After a curt dalliance with Cubism, exemplified by The Pianoforte Lesson, Matisse would return to his original signature love for vivid colors, female person figures, nudes, and Islamic-inspired decorative limerick. His context-free attitude toward genre and technique has inspired subsequent generations of artists. The Piano Lesson is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (Samantha Earl)
Source: https://www.britannica.com/list/5-stunning-henri-matisse-paintings-to-hang-on-your-wall-right-now