painting
Woman with a Hat
, 1905. In this early work, Matisse fused the
influence of Pointillist color theory with Cézanne’s rich, painterly
impasto
.
Matisse was also a prolific printmaker, producing over 800 individual
prints (typically in editions of 25 to 50) from 1900 to 1954. He moved
freely between various printmaking techniques and used the medium as
an extension of his drawing style and process.
Nu Assis, Vu de Dos
, from
1913 (lot 111), exemplifies Matisse’s economic, yet playful and energetic
use of line to create the simplified contour of the female form, precisely
characterizing the artist’s grossly misunderstood work in the 1913 show.
Matisse himself was far from revolutionary and, much like Manet before
him, found the constant criticism of his work in his early career to be
disheartening. Born in the north of France to a family of weavers and
grain merchants, Matisse grew up in a rustic, pre-industrial town before
eventually going away for school and to study law in Paris. In 1889, after
passing the bar exam and becoming a law clerk (which he found
exceedingly tedious), he was diagnosed with appendicitis, and it was only
then, when his mother brought him art supplies during his convalescence,
that he began to paint.
He fraternized with the major Post Impressionists and influential
contemporary artists in Paris, aligning himself with like-minded artists
who would become the Fauves. Throughout his artistic career, his
primary goal remained to explore the, “Essential character of things,”
and he purposefully disregarded the common conventions of
perspective, shadow and the distinction between line and color. While
he looked to his avant-garde contemporaries for inspiration and strove
to be innovative, he apparently still sought to make a living that would
allow him to maintain a life of bourgeois gentility for him and his family;
he was anything but scandalous artistically. When he received news of
the controversy surrounding his works in the Armory Show, he stated in
an interview, “Oh 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 theater!”
