Mediterranean mood with MatisseÂ
Summer is trying its best to take over and, on this lazy Mediterranean weekend, we are feeling like adding some color to the day by sharing the art of our much beloved Henri Matisse.
Henri Emile BenoĂźt Matisse (1869 - 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was also a 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.
The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.
After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.
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.
"I depend entirely on my model," wrote Matisse in 1939. The artist was drawn to powerful women whom he considered his collaborators, challenging and inspiring him to greater heights of creativity. Yet it is fair to say he demanded much of them. As his biographer Hilary Spurling writes, âThey had to learn to live with the unbearable tension Matisse generated when working.â
Their reward was to be depicted as sensuous Ottoman odalisques or dancing girls in blazing strokes of red, ultramarine and yellow.
Splashes of pure energy, vivid colours, adoration of the blooming of Nature in every form - this is what we find in all types of Matisse's art works, not only portraits.
Actually, the South of France was one of the most suitable places to find inspiration for an artist like Matisse but the first encounter with the city of Nice was disappointing for him.
It is in 1917 that Matisse, a man from the North, first discovered Nice where he hoped to treat his bronchitis. From then on, he came back every winter and stayed in hotels until 1921. He then moved to place Charles Felix on the Cours Saleya.
The painting TempĂȘte Ă Nice was painted from the window of the HĂŽtel de la MĂ©diterranĂ©e where the artist moved in November 1918. It evokes his first stay ruined by constant rain at the HĂŽtel Beau-Rivage in Nice.
Disappointed by the poor weather, he was even ready to leave at some point: "I left l'Estaque because of the wind, and because I had caught bronchitis. I came to Nice to treat it, but it rained for a whole month. Eventually I made the decision to leave the city." The following day, the Mistral wind blew the clouds away, the weather was splendid. Discovering the luminosity of the sea and the sky was a life-changing revelation: "When I understood that every morning, I would be able to see such light again, I couldn't believe how happy I was".
Confronted with the threat of German occupation, Matisse left Nice in 1943 and moved in the villa Le RĂȘve in Vence where he stayed until 1949. Painted during the spring of 1944, Lectrice Ă la table jaune is one of the numerous paintings from Matisse's 'Vence Period'. Here, Matisse returned to one of his favourite themes, that of women reading.
The magic of Nice always remained in the heart id the artist. He continued to create paintings deeply linked with it.
For example, "Nature morte aux grenadesand", the painting that eventually became part of the first donation Matisse made to the City of Nice in 1953.
In 1949, Matisse even designed a poster for the tourist office, using this painting to which he added the words "Nice, Travail & Joie" written in his own hand (Nice, Work & Joy).
Matisse's style is also deeply rooted in the exotic, which the poet and traveler John-Antoine Nau calls "a waiting paradise" and which is directly related to the Baudelairean inspiration.
From 1945 onwards Matisse, whilst in Paris, starts to draw models from Martinique and Madagascar.
In Danseuse créole we can see an imaginary creature, half-bird, half-plant. In particular, it illustrates Matisse's fondness for artistic performances and music, in particular jazz, as well as his knowledge of Afro-American culture, discovered during his travels to New-York.
Even if throughout his career Matisse didn't prefer a particular colour on his palette, blue became a privileged colour in his work at the end.
During the last few years of his life, he uses a type of blue with a particular texture so as to obtain a luminous medium through the use of flat-tints.
The intense blue of the cut-out is not meant to symbolise the colour of the sea, but simply because Matisse, through long experimental researches, recognised that this particular blue had a fixing capacity to generate gradually light and colour. The intensity of this unique blue challenges the spectator, similar to the strike of a gong that stops all action, and attracts attention carrying it towards a new vision and a new balance.
As the final stroke of this post, let us choose one of the famous stain glass art works created by Matisse for The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, a unique building which was designed and constructed by the artist as a monument to the gratitude he felt towards his nurse Monique Bourgeois. It is a truly profound space which combines the artistic and the spiritual, and is abiding proof of Matisseâs genius.
"When I put down a green, it doesn't mean grass; and when I put down a blue, it doesn't mean the sky."
Sources: sothebys.com / musee-matisse-nice-org / art we.com
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