HENRI MATISSE: EXPRESSING MOOD OVER REALISM

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.

Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the 20th century and as a rival to Pablo Picasso in the importance of his innovations. He emerged as a Post-Impressionist, and first achieved prominence as the leader of the French movement Fauvism.

Although interested in Cubism, he rejected it, and instead sought to use color as the foundation for expressive, decorative, and often monumental paintings.

As he once controversially wrote, he sought to create an art that would be "a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair."

Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in his Fauve paintings. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color. These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career.

Matisse once declared that he wanted his art to be one "of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter," and this aspiration was an important influence on some, such as Clement Greenberg, who looked to art to provide shelter from the disorientation of the modern world. Read More Here

Henri-Emile-Benoit Matisse was born to middle-class parents Emile-Hippolyte-Henri Matisse, a grain and hardware merchant, and Anna Heloise Gerard. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois and went to school at the College de Saint Quentin, before moving to Paris to study law.

In 1889, he returned to Saint-Quentin as a law clerk, though he found the job tedious and complained of anxiety. Later that year he contracted appendicitis and spent several months at home recovering. During that time, at the age of 20, he discovered the welcome isolation and freedom of painting.

Matisse began to show his work in large group exhibitions in Paris in the mid-1890s, including the traditional Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and his work received some favorable attention. He traveled to London and to Corsica, and in 1898 he married Amélie Parayre, with whom he would have three children.

By the turn of the 20th century, Matisse had come under the more progressive influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who painted in a “Pointillist” style with small dots of color rather than full brushstrokes.

He stopped exhibiting at the official Salon and began submitting his art to the more progressive Salon des Indépendants in 1901. In 1904 he had his first one-man exhibition at the gallery of dealer Ambroise Vollard.

Matisse had a major creative breakthrough in the years 1904-05. A visit to Saint-Tropez in southern France inspired him to paint bright, light-dappled canvases such as Luxe, calme et volupté (1904-05), and a summer in the Mediterranean village of Collioure produced his major works Open Window and Woman with a Hat in 1905.

He exhibited both paintings in the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris. In a review of the show, a contemporary art critic mentioned the bold, distorted images painted by certain artists he nicknamed “fauves,” or “wild beasts.”

Painting in the style that came to be known as Fauvism, Matisse continued to emphasize the emotional power of sinuous lines, strong brushwork and acid-bright colors in works such as The Joy of Life, a large composition of female nudes in a landscape.

Like much of Matisse’s mature work, this scene captured a mood rather than merely trying to depict the world realistically.

After finding his own style, Matisse enjoyed a greater degree of success. He was able to travel to Italy, Germany, Spain and North Africa for inspiration. He bought a large studio in a suburb of Paris and signed a contract with the prestigious art dealers of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.

His art was purchased by prominent collectors such as Gertrude Stein in Paris and the Russian businessman Sergei I. Shchukin, who commissioned Matisse’s important pair of paintings Dance I and Music in 1909-10.

In one of his final projects, Matisse created an entire program of decorations for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948-51), a town near Nice, designing stained-glass windows, murals, furnishings, and even sacred vestments for the church’s priests.

Matisse died on November 3, 1954, at the age of 84, in Nice. He was buried in nearby Cimiez. He is still regarded as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century. Read More Here

   

EUGENE DELACROIX TO HAVE FIRST NORTH AMERICAN RETROSPECTIVE!

Eugène Delacroix Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable

Delacroix, the Visionary Romantic Artist, Gets First Major North American Retrospective. A new exhibition at the Met features nearly 150 of Delacroix’s paintings, drawings and prints

By Brigit Katz
Smithsonian.com

Eugène Delacroix, whose stormy, boundary-defying paintings captivated France in the 19th century, is one of history’s most significant artists. He was a leader of the Romantic Movement, and is regarded by many as a forefather of modernism. The likes of Picasso, Cézanne and van Gogh hailed him as a genius.

“Delacroix’s palette is still the most beautiful in France,” Cézanne once opined. “We all paint in his language.”

Eugène Delacroix self portrait

And yet, in spite of Delacroix’s towering legacy, his art has never been showcased in a full-scale retrospective in North America, Roberta Smith reports for the New York Times. That changes today, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York unveils an expansive exhibition featuring nearly 150 Delacroix works.

Titled simply “Delacroix,” the new retrospective was organized in conjunction with the Louvre, which staged its own Delacroix show earlier this year, to great success.

The Death of Sardanapalus

The New York exhibition will be missing some of the artist’s most famous works, like his French Revolution allegory “Liberty Leading the People,” because they are too fragile to make the journey overseas. But the wealth of paintings, drawings, prints and manuscripts on display gives North American audiences “a rare opportunity to experience the breathtaking talent and remarkable scope of one of the most creative forces of the nineteenth century,” Met director Max Hollein says in a statement.

The exhibition, which spans 12 galleries, is organized chronologically into three distinct phases of the artist’s career: His formative years between 1822 and 1834; his exploration of historical themes, rendered on large murals, between 1835 and 1855; and his interest in nature and memory, which informed his later works until his death in 1863. Read more: 

Books on Delacroix:

  

ERTE: KING OF ART DECO AND CREATING FOR 10 DECADES

Erté Born Roman Petrovich Tyrtov 23 November 1892

St. Petersburg, Russian Empire

Died 21 April 1990 (aged 97)

Paris, France

Nationality Russian, French

Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, from the French pronunciation of his initials (pronounced [ɛʁ.te]). He was a 20th-century artist and designer in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor.

Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period in which he worked. One of his earliest successes was designing apparel for the French dancer Gaby Deslys who died in 1920.

His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognisable, and his ideas and art still influence fashion into the 21st century.

His costumes, programme designs, and sets were featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923, many productions of the Folies Bergère, Bal Tabarin, Théâtre Fémina, Le Lido

In 1925, Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for the silent film Paris. There were many script problems, so Erté was given other assignments to keep him busy. Hence, he designed for such films as Ben-Hur, The Mystic, Time, The Comedian, and Dance Madness.

In 1920 he designed the set and costumes for the film The Restless Sex starring Marion Davies and financed by William Randolph Hearst.

By far, his best-known image is Symphony in Black, depicting a somewhat stylized, tall, slender woman draped in black holding a thin black dog on a leash. The influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times.

 

Erté continued working throughout his life, designing revues, ballets, and operas. He had a major rejuvenation and much lauded interest in his career during the 1960s with the Art Deco revival. He branched out into the realm of limited edition prints, bronzes, and wearable art. Read Much More Here