Henri Matisse’s audacious experimentation with form and color was inseparable from his dedication to an art of harmonious expression, an ambition lost on most of his contemporary viewers. The artist’s early works, composed of bold strokes of vibrant color, led an angry critic in 1905 to label him and colleagues working in a similar manner “les Fauves”—wild beasts.
Brilliant color would nonetheless continue to be one of Matisse’s most important resources, and by 1909 he began to construct compositions featuring flat expanses of vivid tones that saturate the paintings’ surfaces. Matisse radically abbreviated the descriptive elements of his subject matter, sacrificing detail to the overall rhythm and unity of the composition. In his 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter,” he wrote that he dreamed of “an art of balance, or purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.” Matisse remains one of the great joy-givers of the 20th century.
Organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Lydia Mullin, Charlotte Barat and Jennifer Harris, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
