WONDERFUL AND OUTSTANDING VINTAGE MODERN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST LITHOGRAPH BY RENOWNED MODERNIST PAINTER HENRI MATISSE. (French 1869-1854). THIS WORK DEPICTS A BOLD AND VIBRANT CUBISM MUSICAL COMPOSITION CREATED THROUGH THE LITHOGRAPHIC PROCESS. COMPRISED OF COLORFUL DECONSTRUCTED OBJECTS AND FIGURES SIMPLIFIED INTO A GEOMETRIC FORM. MATISSE’S DELIBERATE DISTORTION AND MANIPULATION OF FORMS ADD A DYNAMIC QUALITY TO THE WORK. PLATE SIGNED BY MATISSE. IT DATES AROUND THE 1960s. EXCELLENT OVERALL CONDITION.
DIMENSIONS: 16” H x 20” W
Henri Matisse
Born: 1869 - Nice, France
Died: 1954 - Vence, France
Known for: Fauve modernist painting; sculpture
Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.
In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity .
Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.
Matisse's first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne's way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one's eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion.
When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style.
Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse's intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse's temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: "My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop."
From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality.
Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.
Matisse's uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne's painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne.
Much of Matisse's source of inspiration was poetic. Like his art, the poetry or poetic prose Matisse loved was intimate, sensuous and personal. In his later years he developed the practice of reading poetry early each day before he raised a paint brush, pencil or etching needle. His sources were French medieval poetry of Charles d'Orléans and Pierre de Ronsard, as well as the more avant-garde writings of Stéphane Mallarmé, Henri de Montherlant, Louis Aragon and others. Matisse noted that poetry was like oxygen: "just as when you leap out of bed you fill your lungs with fresh air." This kept him young at heart — like a sensual elixir of youth.
He made hundreds of drawings, original prints and illustrated books. This last art form included what Matisse called his 'flower books'. These were beautiful objects in themselves, inspired by the tradition of the Medieval manuscript. Faces, body parts, lovers, fruit and flowers reveal Matisse's exquisite arabesque lines, along with an extraordinary sense of color. For the celebrated Jazz for instance, the images are characterized by brilliant colors, swirling lines and arabesques form series of jewel-like shapes, in themes which range from the circus to female forms amongst the sea. Matisse made his images from colored stencils based on paper cut-outs.
In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair. Before undergoing a risky operation in Lyon, he wrote an anxious letter to his son, Pierre, insisting, "I love my family, truly, dearly and profoundly." He left another letter, to be delivered in the event of his death, making peace with Amélie.
However, Matisse's extraordinary creativity could not be dampened. "Une seconde vie", a second life, was what he called the last fourteen years of his life. Following and operation he found renewed and unexpected energies. This new lease of life led to an extraordinary burst of expression, the culmination of half a century of work, but also to a radical renewal that made it possible for him to create what he had always struggled for: "I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say."
Until his death he would be cared for Lydia Delectorskaya, who had also modeled for the artist numerous times. With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages , often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés. By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career. The cut-out was not an abdication from painting and sculpting: he called it "painting with scissors." Matisse said, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated." Moreover, experimentation with cut-outs offered Matisse innumerable opportunities to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: "You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird." In 1947 he published Jazz , a limited-edition book containing prints of colorful paper cut collages, accompanied by his written thoughts. In the 1940s he also worked as a graphic artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books. "The walls of my bedroom are covered with cutouts," he wrote to Rouveyre in 1948. "I still don't know what I'll do with them."
In 1951, Matisse completed a monumental four-year project of designing the interior, the glass windows and the decorations of the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence. This project horrified the Catholic hierarchy but also the contemporary art world then largely influenced by Communist dogma. Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. This project was the result of the close friendship between Matisse and Sister Jacques-Marie.
Press coverage wasn't always so helpful, and reporters sensationalized the relationship between the artist and the nun. Sister Jacques-Marie maintains that nothing untoward ever happened between them. But their deep fondness for one another is evident in her conversation and in read snippets of his correspondence.
Sister Jacques-Marie met Matisse in 1942, when she was a student nurse named Monique Bourgeois and Matisse, in his early 70's and recovering from intestinal cancer, advertised for a "young and pretty night nurse."
Matisse's prestige was such that he could largely financed the project himself and after it was completed, the chapel opened in 1951 in a ceremony led by the Archbishop of Nice. At first bewildered, the sisters of the convent came to love its chaste serenity and effulgent color. While he worked models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises. Picasso, accompanied by his lover, Françoise Gilot, was a frequent and welcome visitor. While still fencing with each other like old duelists, they talked art.
The Chapel had taken four years to complete and had exhausted Matisse, who by then was unable to stand for long periods and had to attach his paint brush to a long pole. But in his home, sitting on his bed or in a wheelchair, he continued to make gouache cutouts. After Rouveyre teased him for embracing religion, Matisse urged his friend to look at his cutout of a naked woman, Zulma, at the May Salon in Paris in 1950: "You will see the awakening of the converted," was his retort.
La Gerbe, multicolored leaves that resemble a spray of flowers, was completed a few months before his death, but it explodes with life. The artist who almost reinvented color in painting had by now found freedom in the simplicity of decoration. "I have the mastery of it," he told Rouveyre in a letter. "I am sure of it."
In 1952 the Musée Matisse is inaugurated at the artist's birthplace of Le Cateau-Cambrésis to which he donated 100 of his works - valued at up to $14,000,000.
Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-four, on November 3, 1954, with Marguerite and Delectorskaya at his side. Lydia Delectorskaya left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez and a Musée Matisse