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Bio

French painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. Henri Matisse was a law clerk when he became interested in art. After study with G. Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, he exhibited four paintings at the Salon and scored a triumph when the government bought his Woman Reading (1895). Self-confident and venturesome, he experimented with pointillism but eventually abandoned it in favor of the swirls of spontaneous brushwork and riots of color that became known as Fauvism. He remained a Fauve to the end. Though his subjects were largely domestic and figurative, his works exhibit a distinctive Mediterranean verve. He also took up sculpture, and would produce some 60 pieces during his lifetime. The Armory Show exhibited 13 of his paintings. In 1917 he moved to the French Riviera, where his paintings became less daring but his output remained prodigious. After 1939 he became increasingly active as a graphic artist, and in 1947 published Jazz, a book of reflections on art and life with brilliantly colored illustrations made by "drawing with scissors": the motifs were pasted together after being cut out of sheets of colored paper. He was ill during most of his last 13 years; as thanks to the Dominican nuns who cared for him, he designed the magnificent Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence (1948-51). His well-known paintings include Joy of Life (1906), The Red Studio (1915), Piano Lesson (1916), and The Dance I and II (1931-33).

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