Free Artist information- Henri Matisse for kids

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Mary Cassatt

Paul Cezanne

Frida Kahlo

Rene Magritte

Henri Matisse

Joan Miro

Claude Monet

Edvard Munch

Georgia O'Keeffe

Pablo Picasso

Jackson Pollock

Georges Seurat

Vincent van Gogh

Andy Warhol

Henri Matisse

Born: December 31, 1869
         Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France
Died: November 3, 1954
         Nice, France
Movement: Post-Impressionism,                  Fauvism

Fall of Icarus
1945

Matisse grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois. In 1887, he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started painting during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis, and discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, he made colour a crucial element of his paintings from the first. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac.

Matisse's artistic career was long and varied, covering many different styles of painting from Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and his celebration of bright colors reached its peak in 1917 when he began to spend time on the French Riviera at Nice and Venice. Here he concentrated on reflecting the sensual color of his surroundings and completed some of his most exciting paintings.

Matisse initially became famous as the King of the Fauves, an inappropriate name for this gentlemanly intellectual: there was no wildness in him, though there was much passion. He is an awesomely controlled artist, and his spirit, his mind, always had the upper hand over the "beast" of Fauvism.

In 1941, he was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair. Matisse did not allow this setback to halt his work, and with the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés. His Blue Nudes series feature prime examples of this technique; these demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power. Matisse lived in Cimiez on the French Riviera, now a suburb of the city of Nice, from 1917 until his death in 1954.

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