The Great Atlantic Map Works Gallery

Born on New Year’s Eve 1869, Henri-Emile-Benoît Matisse grew up in northern France and briefly studied law in Paris before turning to painting.

In 1901, Matisse exhibited in Paris, becoming a member of the Fauve movement and by 1904 his work was being collected by influential people. Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences and was one of the first to take an interest in “primitive” art. Matisse soon abandoned the palette of the Impressionists and established his characteristic style, with its flat, brilliant colour and fluid line. His subjects were primarily women, interiors, and still lifes. In 1913, his work was shown in New York and by 1923, two Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, had purchased nearly 50 of his paintings.

Dividing his time between the South of France and Paris, Matisse worked on paintings, sculptures, lithographs, etchings and murals. While recuperating from illness in 1941 and 1942, he concentrated on a technique he had devised earlier: papiers découpés (paper cutouts). “Jazz”, written and illustrated by Matisse, was published in 1947; the plates are stencil reproductions of paper cutouts. In 1948, he began the design for the decoration of Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, which was completed and consecrated in 1951. In the same year, a major retrospective of his work was presented in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco. In 1952, the Musée Matisse was inaugurated at the artist’s birthplace of Le Cateau-Cambrésis. Matisse continued to make large paper cutouts, the last of which was a design for a rose window for a church in New York. He died on November 3, 1954, in Nice.

Matisse Lithographs after Cut-Outs

Between 1950 and 1954, the year of his death, Matisse created some highly innovative, brightly coloured gouache paper cut-outs. Illness had confined him to a wheelchair and severe arthritis made it difficult for him to paint. Some of the resulting colours were so strong that Matisse’s doctor was said to have advised him to wear dark glasses.

In 1953 it was decided to reinterpret these works as lithographs. Matisse personally directed and supervised the first ‘pulls’ during 1954, in collaboration with the renowned lithographers Mourlot Frères of Paris. Founded in 1921, Mourlot worked with many of the great artists of the 20th century, including Picasso, Miró, Vlaminck, Bonnard and Dufy.

Matisse’s joie de vivre was unimpaired by old age. He wrote, “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter ... like a comforting influence, a mental balm - something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue”.