Henri MATISSE (1869-1954)

Henri Matisse is one of the great masters of modern art, emerging early in the twentieth century in Paris as a leader of the Fauves, or Wild Beasts.
He didn’t look or act like a beast, but in fact had been a lawyer who started to paint, at the age of 21, when he was convalescing from an illness.
He quickly fell under the influence of the great modern innovators, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Seurat, and pushed even further to disintegrate the traditional look of art. His paintings had intense color and liquid freeforms which didn’t match reality, but which had the expressive capacity of something primitive, primordial, beastly!
From the earliest of times, Matisse and Picasso were considered rivals, both equally gifted and vying for position; while they were competitive, however, they had tremendous mutual respect, visited each other throughout their lives, and traded paintings. Matisse was considered the master of color; Picasso of mass and space. Both, of course, were masters of all.
After his initial display of Fauve madness, Matisse devoted his talents to images of comfort, beauty, grace and calm, a sort of pre-civilized Eden where there was innocence and refuge, all determined by patterns of the most delicate lines, flat planes, and vivid colors. Matisse wanted his art to be like a relaxing armchair for the tired, busy, frazzled modern person.