The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has a new exhibition, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917.

In the time between Henri Matisse’s (1869–1954) return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, the artist produced some of the most demanding, experimental, and enigmatic works of his career—paintings that are abstracted and rigorously purged of descriptive detail, geometric and sharply composed, and dominated by shades of black and gray. Works from this period have typically been treated as unrelated to one another, as an aberration within the artist’s development, or as a response to Cubism or World War I.

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MATISSE GOLDFISH by Bob Kessel

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Bob Kessel has created an art series titled, “Something Fishy”. It features pictures based on the works of Henri Matisse like the picture “MATISSE GOLDFISH” shown above. These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

Henri Matisse, born in 1869, is regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, as well as the leader of the Fauve group. Fauvism is defined as an early-20th-century movement in painting begun by a group of French artists and marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors. Matisse was associated with this group due to his use of vivid colors, as well as his unusual style of presenting objects. Many critics at this time called him, as well as other artists with similar styles, a disgrace for art and therefore called them ‘The Fauves’. The Fauves means ‘Wild Beasts’, a name that the artists of the group accepted with pride. The main goals of the artists in this movement were to break away from the rigid Impressionist movement, and begin using bolder colors, as well as their own interpretations of shapes. The work of Matisse is based on the principals and possibilities of ‘leaving out’. The human mind can fill in what is missing in the painting, like dimension, details and plastical forms. The Fauves expressed their feelings of joy for life and joy for art and painting. Fauvism paved the way for future styles of art, and was considered radical in the early 20th century.

MATISSE AND HIS MODEL by Bob Kessel

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See more Matisse inspired art by Bob Kessel by clicking here.

Kay with half of SOMETHING FISHY poster, which side by side create one large image.

Bob Kessel has created an art series titled, “Something Fishy“.
It features pictures based on the works of Henri Matisse like the picture “MATISSE GOLDFISH” shown below.
These pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints.
Contact Bob Kessel for pricing and availability.

MATISSE GOLDFISH by Bob Kessel

FISH RED STUDIO by Bob Kessel

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Bob Kessel has created an art series based on Henri Matisse. The pictures are available as signed and numbered limited edition fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, “In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most.” By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes — which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves — Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life.

Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover “the essential character of things” and to produce an art “of balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.

In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity  in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity .

When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d’Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse’s most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. “A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public” was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves’ color “sticks of dynamite.” The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse.

Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.

Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cezanne.

Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal.