Couture: The Family Business
For generations, Matisse’s family had been involved in the textile industry in northern France. Matisse had an innate appreciation of textiles and was an avid collector or fabrics, from his early days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with exotic costumes and wall hangings. His collection ranged from Parisian coutoure gowns and North African wall hangings to Turkish robes. Used traditionally at first, as background elements in his compositions, textiles soon became a springboard for his complex and modernist experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and harmonies and contrasts of color, line and volume.
Portraiture: The Family Studio
"I love my family, truly, dearly and profoundly," insisted Matisse to his younger son Pierre. This appeared not only in letter but was demonstrated by Matisse in the depiction of his family throughout his career. Marguerite, Matisse’s only daughter, was a favorite subject and model of his, especially when in her teenage years. Her prominent, simple features not surprisingly piqued the curiosity and admiration of the artist and father. In 1954 at Matisse’s bedside before his passing appeared his doctor, nurse, secretary and Marguerite.
Morocco: The Exotic Dream
Matisse traveled often, visiting Russia, Germany, Spain, Morroco and even Tahiti as his predecessor Paul Gauguin did. During his sojourns he encountered Moorish architecture, the works of Velázquez, El Greco and Goya, and in Morocco in 1912 and early 1913, he reaffirmed his faith in the marriage of light and color. At the age of 60 Matisse even sailed from San Francisco to Tahiti, where he experienced the sea, sky, vegetation and Polynesian people, who would profoundly inspire his radiant and rhythmic distribution of form in his later work. As Matisse believed: even the most complex as well as most direct emotion may be produced by the simplest of means.
Odalisque: An Orientalist Fantasy
When Matisse moved from his Paris environs to his Nice studio where he began a series of works on the odalisque - the long-standing art historical tradition of the reclining harem-he was immediately dismissed for turning his back on his Modernist-bent sensibilities that won him the favor among critics and artists. Many accused him of turning out overtly-sexual pictures for affluent patrons, but this interlude was in fact a phase of chromatic experiment and volume that could not have otherwise prepared him for the last two decades of his career.
Abstraction and Patterning
In Notes of a Painter, written in 1908, Matisse described his aim as an artist: to discover the essential character of things beneath their superficial appearances; to produce "an art of balance, of purity and serenity," decorative in conception and expressive of his emotional reactions to the subjects he composed. This harmony reached an apogee of decorativeness and artificiality in his profusely patterned and spatially dislocated surfaces (present in the perspective from a variety of different view-points) and his intuitively worked and colored subjects.
Themes and Variations
By the 1930s Matisse had gradually abandoned easel painting, re-inventing himself and exploring new artistic sensibilities largely through drawing and print. No longer did he apply loose brushwork and myriad colors of paints but emphasized formal simplicity. What developed were groups of works showing his model in similar or different poses, costumes, and settings: a sequence of themes and variations that gained in mystery and intensity as it unfolded. By the end of the decade Matisse’s touch, restrained in this new, more deliberate way of making, nonetheless gained in the unequivocal directness imposed upon his compositions.