Henri Matisse

(French, 1869–1954)

Henri Matisse was one of the most influential French artists of the 20th century. Matisse’s use of unmodulated color, inventive figuration, and decorative patterns helped redefine many of the formal tenets of painting. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,” he once said. Born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse on December 31, 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, he took to art relatively late in life after initially pursuing law. First studying painting under Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, he quickly adopted the Pointillist ideas espoused by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. With Pointillism as a point of departure, Matisse, along with Albert Marquet and André Derain, developed a radical method of using pure color to express light in what became known as Fauvism. Matisse would return to a style which incorporated both naturalistic and decorative elements, as evinced in his paintings The Red Studio (1911) and Goldfish (1911). In the decades that followed, the artist spent much of his time in the South of France, painting models dressed as odalisques and the ocean views he saw from his hotel room. Late in his career, while bedridden, Matisse produced a number of cutout paper works, including Icarus (1943-1944) and Blue Nude II (1952). The artist died on November 3, 1954 in Nice, France. In 2018, the artist’s Odalisqque couchée aux magnolias (1923) sold for $80,750,000 at Christie’s, an auction record for Matisse. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London, among others.