LEAH MUEHLICH 21/22 AMFI GRAPHICS LAB
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Henri Matisse is widely reg colorist of the 20th centu used color as the founda decorative and large-sca wrote that he sought to c be “a soothing, calming rather like a good armch embraced life-affirming s novative use of color, line loose interpretations of lig
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garded as the greatest ury. The French artist ation for his expressive, ale paintings. He once create art that would influence on the mind, hair”. As a result, he subjects, making ine and form to create ght and space.
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01 A timeline of Matisse
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Introduction to the author
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03 The Blue Nudes
Jazz Series
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s M ? E ATISS
The French artist, Henri Matisse was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, living from 1869 to 1954, his career spanned over five decades and covered drawing, printmaking, sculpture and painting, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original style. Along with Pablo Picasso, he is renowned as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the 20th century, and who is responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
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1869 Henri Matisse was born on December 31, 1869, and was raised in a small industrial town in northern France. He first studied law and worked as lawyer’s secretary. When he was 21, Matisse began painting while recuperating from an illness
1891 In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. But it wasn’t until 1898, when he went to the Brittany coast to visit the Australian artist John Russel, that Matisse started painting in his iconic bright colors.
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1900
During the early 1900s, Matisse travelled to various parts of the world to study, including Algeria, Spain and Morocco. The effect on Matisse’s art from those adventures was a new boldness through his use of intense, unmodulated color, particularly the addition of black to his palette.
Around 1904 he met Pablo Picasso, who was 12 years younger than Matisse. The two became life-long friends as well as rivals and are often compared; one key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists
1904
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Together with André Derain, Henri Matisse was the foremost figure of Fauvism, a style of painting that emerged in 1904. Les Fauves (French for “the wild beasts”) emphasized form & strong color over realistic elements. Fauvism as a movement only lasted a few years, but this short period was later seen as a very influential art movement.
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”””””” 10
Together with André Derain, Henri Matisse was the foremost figure of Fauvism, a style of painting that emerged in 1904. Les Fauves (French for “the wild beasts”) emphasized form & strong color over realistic elements. Fauvism as a movement only lasted a few years, but this short period was later seen as a very influential art movement. Matisse worked up to his death, despite living with chronic illness and disability which forced him to work from his bed or wheelchair. During this time he made his famous cut-outs by ‘drawing with scissors’; cutting into brightly coloured sheets of paper and helped by his assistants who arranged the paper cut-outs on the wall of his studio until he was happy with the composition. 11
The Blue Nudes is a series of color lithographs by Henri Matisse made from cut-outs depicting nude figures in various positions. Restricted by his physical condition after his surgery for stomThe color blue signified distance and volume to Matisse. Frustrated in his attempts to successfully marry dominant and contrasting tones, the artist was moved to use solid slabs of single color early in his career, a technique that became known as Fauvism. The painted gouache cut-outs that compose the Blue Nudes were inspired by Matisse’s collection of African sculpture and his visit to Tahiti, in 1930.
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tangible, relief-like quality, especially the sense of volume created by the overlapping of the cut-outs.
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ach cancer, Matisse began creating art by cutting and painting sheets of paper by hand and supervised the creation of
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the lithographs until his death in 1954. Blue Nude IV, the first of the four nudes, took a notebook of studies and two weeks’ work of cutting and aranging before the resulting artefact satisfied him. In the event, Matisse finally arrived at his favorite pose, for all four works, intertwining legs and an arm stretching behind the neck. The posture of the nude woman is like the posture of a number of seated nudes made in the
years of the 1920s, ultimately, the posture derives from the reposed figures of Le bonheur de vivre. Despite the flatness of paper, the cut-outs reflect Matisse’s earlier sculptures in their
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SOURCES Berry, C., 2020. Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, The artist’s famous cut-outs at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral. From: https://craigberry93.medium. com/matisse-drawing-with-scissors-b52b14fb874d. Biography.com, 2017. Henry Matisse, Biography. From: https://www.biography.com/artist/henri-matisse. Henri Matisse Biography. https://www.henrimatisse. org/. Karg, A., 2019. Henri Matisse: 8 Outstanding Paintings by the French Fauvist. From: https://www. thecollector.com/henri-matisse-8-outstandingpaintings-by-the-french-fauvist/. Fulleylove, R., 2021. Matisse and his creative process. From: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/SAWxgDxc9tAHKQ?hl=en Becoming Matisse. Television programme, BBC, 17 April 2020. Henri Matisse: A cut above the rest. Television programme, BBC, 6 November 2014.
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