Matisse, Henri Emile Benoît

French painter, sculptor and illustrator. Matisse was one of the most original creative forces in early 20th-century art. He was a leading figure in fauvism and later developed a style characterized by strong, sinuous lines, surface pattern, and brilliant colour. The Dance (1910; The Hermitage, St Petersburg) is characteristic. Matisse regarded composition as simply the arrangement of elements to express feeling. He was not a believer in heavy theory, but felt that art should be ‘restful’, natural, joyous, colourful, and above all expressive. Later works include pure abstracts, as in his collages of coloured paper shapes (gouaches découpées).

Influenced by Impressionism and then post-Impressionism, by 1905 he had developed his fauvist style of strong, expressive colours, which he maintained throughout his career. Largely unaffected by cubism and other strident forms of modern art, he concentrated on the decorative effects of colour, line and form, a vivid example being The Red Room (1908–09; The Hermitage, St Petersburg).

As early as 1899 he made sculptures and in later years resumed the practice of free and unconventional modelling, his best-known works being the series in bronze relief, The Back (1909–29). As a graphic artist he produced etchings, lithographs, and wood engravings, and illustrated Mallarmé's poems, James Joyce's Ulysses and other works. As a designer he produced sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also designed and built the chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, near Nice, consecrated in 1951, a late work of importance in applying an entirely modern decorative sense to a religious interior.