How Matisse made flatness fabulous
Trained as a lawyer, Henri Matisse discovered in a somewhat unconventional way that he was fated to be an artist. When he was 21, and suffering from a severe bout of appendicitis, his mother bought him some art supplies to relieve his boredom as he lay in bed. He started painting, and, “from the moment I held the box of colours in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a wild animal.”
Matisse’s mother encouraged him to not adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather to rely on his emotions, and attempt to express them powerfully. Throughout his long life (he died aged 84, in 1954) he remained forever faithful to his work, even warning his wife, Amélie Parayre: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.”
In 1904, when he was 35, Matisse had a creative epiphany; a visit to Saint-tropez inspired him to paint brightly dappled canvases. This approach led him to head a group of artists known as les Fauves, “the wild beasts” of early 20th-century art. Marked by a bold use of colour, their work was instantly more vivid than the gentle depictions of their forerunners, the Impressionists. Matisse’s hotly toned paintings of naked figures dancing in orgiastic frenzy became the Fauves’ touchstone.
Then, in March 1906, Gertrude Stein took Matisse to visit Picasso in Montmartre. Until then, she wrote, “Matisse had never heard of Picasso, and Picasso had never met Matisse”. Soon the pair began a rivalry that encouraged and challenged each to be ever greater. An observer commented that they “bounced off each other, outdid each other, honoured each other, and occasionally ignored each other, in ways that were sometimes calculated, sometimes instinctive, and sometimes fortuitous”.
Describing their relationship, Matisse stated: “We are as different as the North Pole is from the South Pole.” But that polarity attracted each to the other; there was a constant shift in the roles of “giver and taker, leader and follower, hero and antihero”. As Matisse explained: “We must talk to each other as much as we can. When one of us dies, there will be some things that the other will never be able to talk of with anyone else.”
They met regularly to discuss their work and subjected themselves to intense personal scrutiny. Whatever opinion they had of the new paintings each would share, they alone could argue as equals, with an abiding respect and admiration for the other’s skills. Picasso told his biographer John Richardson: “You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at the time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I, and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”
Within a year of them meeting, the two artists began to exchange paintings, in order to learn from each other. Each was “foreign to the other’s vision,” Richardson explained. Although Matisse’s subject matter was traditional – portraits, nudes, landscapes, interiors – his use of distorting bold colour and sinuous brushwork to express emotion was revolutionary, and deeply influential to modernist artists.
In The Red Studio (1911), he painted the walls so they appear to have bled into the floor, so that the floor and walls merge without edges, creating a continuum of red. One piece of furniture is not perceptibly different from another, and only white and yellow outlines distinguish their shape beyond their red interiors. In reality, his studio was white.
Matisse painted The Red Studio after travelling to Spain, where he was drawn to traditional Islamic art, admiring its decorative nature and use of pattern. He was driven to explore different ways of depicting space. The Red Studio itself is laid out like a flat-pack – the use of red further intensifies the appearance of a flat image. Angled lines, used to suggest depth and spatial discontinuities, emphasise the studio as a private space, reflective of the artist’s internal world.
The painting’s central axis is a grandfather clock, without hands, suggesting timelessness. Matisse turns three-dimensional objects into two dimensions, reassembled and carefully arranged as a retrospective of his favourite paintings, sculptures, and ceramics displayed in his studio.
The colour red is suggestive of blood and fire, and full of symbolic meaning – sexual desire, anger, violence, love and death – but the painting seems to depict red as neither threatening nor unnerving. Rather, it is warmly inviting. Matisse appears to have cut out the art works to appear free-standing. Later in life, he made large-scale cut-out paper collages and named the technique “painting with scissors”, creating some of his most poignant works.
In 1942, Matisse met a student nurse named Monique Bourgeois He had advertised for a “pretty and young night nurse” and hired her to look after him following an operation; Matisse was 72 at the time, and found the 21-year-old Bourgeois entrancing. When he was feeling better, he asked her to pose for him.
They lost contact but reunited when Matisse moved to the nearby small town of Vence, taking a house across from a convent, and he and his charming nurse – now Sister Jacques-marie – spent many years as close companions. Newspapers preyed upon the idea that the artist was having an affair with a nun.
In 1943, Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. He suffered highly invasive surgery, and a colostomy left him in a wheelchair. Often bedridden and impaired, he was undefeated and continued to create art from a couch in his studio. He would often use a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long pole to draw on to paper or canvas attached to the wall until, in 1954, when he was in his eighties, he had a fatal heart attack.
He and Picasso remain art’s twin titans of the 20th century.