Henri Matisse

French, 1869–1954

BiographyHenri-Émile-Benoit Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 to a family of merchants and grain brokers in Picardy in northern France. After studying law in Paris, Matisse was embarked upon a legal career in his family's hometown when, while convalescing from a serious illness, he was given a paint set to help him while away his hours of boredom. After this belated beginning, and over the objections of his family, Matisse returned to Paris to study painting, working at the Académie Julian and then studying under Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) at the École des Beaux-Arts. Despite this apparently conservative training, Matisse forged bonds with independent and radical painters at work in Paris, and by 1905 was perceived as one of the leaders of the Fauves. Paintings like The Woman with the Hat (1905; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) shocked the public in Europe and America alike. However, Matisse rapidly found patrons among elite American and Russian collectors, including Gertrude, Sarah and Michael Stein, the Cone sisters, and Dr. Albert C. Barnes, although his work remained controversial within France.
Matisse was then able to travel widely and to enjoy a measure of material comfort. By 1909 he moved his household to a comfortable house at Issy-les-Moulineaux outside Paris, at first renting and then buying the property in 1913. In 1917 he began to winter in Nice, on the Côte d'Azur, a region frequented largely by wealthy English and American tourists. Matisse divided his time between Paris, Nice, and travel elsewhere for the remainder of his life.

In 1925 Matisse was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. In 1930 his work was featured in important exhibitions in New York and Berlin; and he traveled within the United States while en route to Tahiti. Also, in 1930 Matisse returned to America to jury an exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and made a third visit in conjunction with the mural commission he accepted from Albert C. Barnes, outside Philadelphia. He had two influential retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1931, 1951); coinciding with the latter, Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, published his influential text, Matisse: His Art and his Public. Matisse, then in failing health, developed his late cutout technique in designs for the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence (France), consecrated in the summer of 1950. Matisse executed designs for other large decorative projects in the last years of his life, including his last work, a window for Union Church in Pocantico Hills, New York, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1954. The artist died in Nice on 3 November 1954.