Creator story
Surprising fact
Confined to bed late in life, Matisse painted with scissors, cutting shapes from painted paper to create his radiant final masterpieces.
Source: Wikipedia / WikimediaModernism
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was the master of colour and a founder of Fauvism, the great rival and counterpart to Picasso. In old age, unable to paint, he reinvented art again with his bold paper cut-outs.
Matisse freed colour from description, making it pure joy and structure; he and Picasso defined 20th-century art.
- Led the Fauves, whose wild, pure colour shocked Paris in 1905.
- His lifelong rivalry and dialogue with Picasso drove modern art forward.
- Reinvented himself with cut-paper collages when illness ended his painting.
Key works
Three entry points into the world of Henri Matisse
These works make it easiest to see how the artist changed form, content, and the very way art could exist in culture.
1910
Dance
Dance shows how Henri Matisse turns the language of modernism into a coherent painted image.
1911
L'Atelier Rouge
In L'Atelier Rouge, Henri Matisse makes the structure, scale, and logic of modernism especially legible.
1905
The Open Window
The Open Window condenses the core ideas of modernism into a memorable painted image.