Matisse: Innovation From an Armchair

The "Henri Matisse Retrospective" exhibition is the largest travelling exhibiton ever housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Including more than 350 works, it displays the full range of Matisse's creative activity and development. More than 148,000 people saw it during its six-week stay in Chicago. Anticipating a similar response in New England, the Boston museum will keep the special exhibition galleries open until 10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday until the exhibition leaves on July 1.

Looking chronologically, the total view of Matisse's artistic production reveals a progressive shift of emphasis from elaboration to a maximum simplicity. His artwork demonstrates an increasing interest in the instantaneous expression of a whole idea and a decreasing effort to fill in the detail. But attempt to organize Matisse's career into a linear development or to categorize his work into formal periods or genres results in failure. His curiosity creativity moved with such freedom of imagination that the structure of associations was too personal and complex for scholars ever to untangle, best, they can try to understand what he was looking for and examine way in which he conducted his search, and can try to fit his accomplishments into that context.

At the age of 22, Matisse was on the verge of becoming a lawyer when--like Degas and Manet before him--he abandoned the law to paint. Matisse came to Paris in 1891 and found it vibrating with artistic activity. Seurat and Van Gogh had died only a few years before and Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Lautrec, Redon, Henri Rousseau, and Rodin were very much alive and active in the city. During his first years in Paris, Matisse studied with Gustave Moreau who was unprejudiced against experimental art even though known work was a continuation of Delacroix along traditional lines. With Moreau's encouragement, Matisse did many "free" copies of masterworks in Louvre, to study their structure manner of expression. Books and Candle (1890) is one of the early works in this 'student phase' of Matisse career (see illustration).

Along with his study of old masters, Matisse experimented with the uniques of Impressionism and with bright light and color harmonies of Seurat's "pointillism" (also called "divisionism," this theory of painting suggested that brighter secondary colors, such as green, could be obtain making a series of small patches of the primary colors--in the case of green they are blue and yellow--and allowing these colors to blend in the viewer's eye at a certain distance from the painting rather than mixing the pigments themselves.