Henri Matisse

pseudonym: -

birth data

date of birth: 1869

place of birth: Le Cateau

death data

date of death: 1954

death: Nizza

biography

The French painter, graphic artist and sculptor Henri Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 in Le Cateau in the north of France. Together with Pablo Picasso he is considered one of the most important artists of Classical Modernism and, alongside André Derain, a precursor and major representative of Fauvism. His early paintings were still influenced by the Impressionists. The painterly style he developed as a result, with intensive fields of colour, pushed realism into the background and characterised the works of the Fauves group of artists that included Derain, Vlaminck and Manguin, among others. Matisse became the central figure in this circle. For him, colour became the purely compositional device of an autonomous pictorial space, dominated by decorative planar, arabesque-like elements. From 1944 Matisse created his so-called gouaches découpées - a type of collage in which individual shapes are cut out of paper first painted in gouache. His late work, that rounded off his striving for reduction, is considered a highlight of his artistic career and has had a lasting influence on modern art. Matisse died on 3 November 1954 in Cimiez, a district of Nice.