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A master of modern French painting

3 November 1954

M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.

Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.

Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.

Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.

‘Les Fauves’

Up to now, though he was experimenting, Matisse had not kicked over the traces. He was exhibiting regularly at the official Salon, and in 1904 the dealer Vollard, from whom he had bought Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ to hang in his studio, gave him a one-man show of nearly 50 pictures. The explosion came at the Autumn Salon of 1905. For this exhibition Matisse organized a collection of works by the more advanced painters, including himself, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck, and these were hung in a room by themselves. An indignant critic, Louis Vauxcelles, writing in Gil Blas, called the room a ‘cage aux Fauves’ or ‘cage of wild beasts’, and the name stuck. Beyond distortion or deformation of natural appearance in the interests of design and vehemence in statement, the Fauves had no common doctrine. Fauvism, in fact, might be described as a violent wrenching away of the picture from literal representation.

A picture that came in for special abuse was Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’. This, for which Mme Matisse was the model, was bought by the American writer Miss Gertrude Stein, who was doing useful propaganda for the rebels. In 1906 she introduced Matisse to Picasso, who was then painting her portrait. Matisse was now celebrated. The Galerie Druet gave him a big one-man show, and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.

Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.

Visit to America

On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.

Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.

Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.

In 1947 Matisse offered to design and build a chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, and this was consecrated in 1951. An architect built it on a plan suggested by the artist and inside Matisse painted three large compositions in black on white ceramic tiles. Last year there was an exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate Gallery, and he was honoured by the National Arts Foundation in New York as an ‘outstanding artist of 1953’. Matisse was a member of the French Communist Party, but his standing with the Communists in recent years was unclear. Criticism came from Russia of his chapel at Vence, and in 1952 the French Communist Party was reported to be considering his expulsion for not falling into line with Moscow’s instructions that art must be ‘realistic and depict Communist ideals’.

There can be no doubt about Matisse’s technical competence as a painter, but graceful as they are, his innumerable ‘Odalisques’ in Mediterranean interiors may to some minds end by becoming rather boring. Matisse himself said: ‘While working, I never try to think, only to feel.’ That is enough to explain his distortions, perhaps also his defects. As a colourist he was something more than decorative, because he had in high degree the rare capacity to establish the position of objects in the depth of the picture by the relations between colours, without the aid of linear or atmospheric perspective.