亨利·马蒂斯（Henri matisse,1869-1954）

　　1869年12月31日生于法国南部勒卡多小镇。

　　1879年 10岁 进入公学，主要学习拉丁文和希腊文。

　　1887年 18岁 中学毕业。父亲把他送到巴黎学习法律，他顺利地通过了考试。

　　1889年 19岁 正式完成学业后，他回到家乡附近的圣·康丹，在一家律师事务所当上了办事员，他的主要工作是抄写存入档案的资料。

　　1890年 21岁 患盲肠炎住进医院，为打发无聊时间，母亲送来一箱画具让他临摹箱盖上的图画。未料想马蒂斯的绘画热情一发不可收拾，偶然的机缘成为其一生的转折点。

　　1891年 22岁 说服父亲，马蒂斯怀抱当一名画家的志向，再次来到巴黎。马蒂斯先就学于学院派画家 布格罗 门下。

　　1892年 23岁 转入 象征主义 画家 莫罗 的画室学习。在莫罗鼓励下，他认真研习卢浮宫的藏画，不间断地临摹各艺术大师的作品，在巴黎街头写生，探索着自己的艺术道路。

　　1896年 27岁 他的4幅油画第一次在“国家美术联盟沙龙”公开展出，获得成功。

　　1896-1904年 是艺术家寻找新方向时期。马蒂斯内心萌动了革新意念，开始注视 印象主义 、新印象主义、 后印象主义 的作品，欲从各种风格汲取营养。一段时间，他跑到街头、咖啡馆等地画了无数的画，使他迸一步熟悉了色彩的特性， 塞尚 的技巧又促进他研究新的技法。

　　1898年 29岁 初露头角的马蒂斯渐成家立业，妻子是个温顺而贤慧的女性，画家夙愿得偿，且在绘画间隙尝试 雕塑 的创作。

　　1899年 30岁 马蒂斯的 风景画 、人物画、 静物画 已与昔日大相径庭，形体之简洁、色彩之鲜亮，让老师莫罗甚感惊讶。

　　1903年 34岁 带有明显“ 野兽派 ”特征的作品，便提前出现在他的笔下。

　　1903-1906年 野兽派盛行的三年。这期间反对者的咒骂声此起彼伏，马蒂斯也遭到强烈攻击，幸好有几个收藏家独具慧眼，大量购买他的作品，马蒂斯一时身价百倍。

　　1905年 36岁 巴黎秋季沙龙美术作品展揭幕时，一位名叫路易·沃塞尔的批评家被一幅幅用纯色随意涂抹成的油画惊得目瞪口呆。室中间有一尊多那太罗的雕像，批评家指着雕像惊呼“多那太罗被野兽包围了！”这一句戏言，使西方美术史上出现了一个崭新的流派 —— 现代美术史上的第一个正式画派野兽派，作为这个潮流的灵魂人物，马蒂斯的大名也不胫而走，蜚声世界。

　　1906年之后 马蒂斯的艺术创作进入多产时期。他的个展在巴黎、纽约、莫斯科、伦敦、斯德哥尔摩、柏林等城市辗转展出。他也借机旅行欧洲、北非，巡礼各地艺术寻求新的灵感源泉。他成为当时国际画坛最活跃的画家之一。

　　1914年 45岁 马蒂斯年年到南方的尼斯港过冬，在一间闲静的画室里完成了许多作品，室内的女人及静物是他最喜欢画的题材。

　　1920年之后 马蒂斯扩大了创作领域，他在雕塑、版画、壁画、插图方面的造诣同样展示出过人的才赋。

　　1930年之后 他的艺术达到高峰，他被同行推为本世纪最负盛名的美术巨匠。

　　1941年 72岁 马蒂斯患了肠道疾病，经历了两次痛苦的手术，从此病魔就再没离开过他。身体的虚弱使他再也不能站在画布前作画，于是他又开始了一种新的艺术创作 —— 剪纸。 为了剪出色彩鲜丽的作品，他亲自动手，染出自己需要的彩纸，靠在床上不停地剪。这位老人仿佛在以孩子的娱乐消磨最后的时光。虽然他生命的最后两年几乎都是在病床上度过的，但他的创造力却从来没有停息过。

　　1954年11月3日，马蒂斯逝世在长期居住的尼斯，享年85岁。

　　野兽派的画家们没有正式宣言，也没有系统的理论，只在强调主观自由发挥，强调形的表现力上是一致的。

　　马蒂斯（1869－1954年）是野兽派当之无愧的领袖人物。但"野兽派"时期只不过是马蒂斯艺术生涯中的一个短暂时期，马蒂斯的独特风格则主要是他在"野兽派"时期之后渐渐形成的。马蒂斯认为艺术有两种表现方法，一种是照原样摹写，一种是艺术地表现。他主张后者。他说："我所追求的，最重要的就是表 现…．我无法区别我对生活具有的感情和我表现感情的方法。"马蒂斯一生都在做着实验性探索，在色彩上追求一种单纯原始的稚气。他向东方艺术吸取了许多平面表现方法，画面富于装饰感。在学习东方艺术的过程中，他从原来追求动感、表现强烈、无拘无束的观点，渐渐发展成追求一种平衡、纯洁和宁静感。他后来自己评价自己的作品说：我的作品"好象一种抚慰，象一种稳定剂，或者象一把合适的安乐椅，可以消除他的疲劳，"马蒂斯认为无论是和谐的色彩或不和谐的色彩，都能产生动人的效果，他还认为，色彩的选择应以观察、感觉和各种经验为根本，"色彩的目的，是表达画家的需要，而不是看事物的需要。"

　　晚年马蒂斯由于关节炎和其它疾病，已不能坐在画架前继续他心爱的工作。此时他早已是享誉世界的艺术大师，已经创造了足够多的辉煌，但这位年近八旬的艺术家并没有闲着，他把全部时间和精力都投入到了剪纸创作中，并以剪纸的形式创造出新的辉煌。客人们去访问他，会发现马蒂斯的卧室从天花板到四壁全都布满了彩色剪纸，有的粘在画布上，有的钉在墙上，有的则从空中垂落到地板上。这些彩色纸片帮助他最大限度地发挥纯色的表现力，对于这位高龄的艺术家来说，这或许就是一种最简单、最直接的表现自我的手段了。马蒂斯说："剪纸是至今我所发现的表达我自己的最简单最直接的方法、"他还说："剪纸就是给色彩加上形态，其工作犹如给石块雕刻上形态的雕塑家所做的工作一样、"由此可见，剪纸在这位大师心中的地位。

　　马蒂斯利用剪纸进一步发展了他绘画作品中那种装饰风格的优美韵致，他的剪纸，富于幻想的情调，创造了一种神话般的如梦似幻的境界。马蒂斯的剪纸创作跃动着一种旺盛的生命力，洋溢着春天的气息，明朗而欢快。面对这些美妙的充满生命力的作品，你难以想象这是出自一位病痛缠身的八旬老人之手。

马蒂斯的艺术成就

　　亨利·马蒂斯出生在法国北部小镇卡托,逝于尼斯的西米亚兹。他是20世纪初最前卫的美术流派 —— 野兽主义的领袖。

　　马蒂斯早年从事法律事务，23岁改学绘画，曾入朱利安美术学院师从布格罗，尔后进象征主义画家莫罗的画室。 莫罗 对色彩的主观见解对马蒂斯影响很大，莫罗认为“美的色调不可能从抄袭自然中获得，绘画的色彩必须依靠思索、想像和梦幻才能获得”。在他离开学校后又受西涅克的点彩派影响，同时吸收凡·高和高更所长，借鉴黑人雕塑和东方装饰艺术，表现出对传统艺术的彻底决裂。作品中体现了野兽派的美学观念：即大胆的色彩、简练的造型、和谐一致的构图以及强烈的装饰性，形成了他独特的画风 —— 那就是世人熟悉的画面简洁、清晰，省略了多余的细节，以单纯的线条和色彩构成画面艺术形象。

　　1908年马蒂斯公开表明了自己的艺术观念，他说：奴隶式的再现自然，对于我是不可能的事。我被迫来解释自然，并使它服从我的画面的精神。色彩的选择不是基于科学，我没有先入之见的运用颜色，色彩完全本能地向我涌来。他还说过：我所梦想的艺术，充满着平衡、纯洁、静穆，没有令人不安、引人注目的题材。一种艺术对每个精神劳动者是一种平息的手段,一种精神慰藉手段熨平他的心灵；对于他们意味着从日常辛劳和工作里获得宁静。他称这种艺术为安乐椅式的艺术。

　　在野兽派销声匿迹以后，马蒂斯仍继续他的艺术探索。他为了研究人体借助于雕塑，他一生创作了大约70件雕塑作品。在20年代之前曾采用各种自由手法创造一种新的绘画空间，还经历了短暂的 立体主义 时期，但他从未出现支离破碎的物象，他通过研究如何将物体几何化、简化。他在不改变观点的前提下，将大块的鲜明色彩作抽象的安排，达到既富有装饰性又具有空间深度的效果。

　　晚年的马蒂斯通过彩色剪纸来试验色彩关系。他的艺术达到极其简练，带有平面装饰性。然而他的伟大之处正在于超越狭小的装饰天地,从而创造了“大装饰艺术”的概念。

"Henri Matisse was born in 1869, the year the Cutty Sark was launched. The year he died, 1954, the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. Not only did he live on, literally, from one world into another; he lived through some of the most traumatic political events in recorded history, the worst wars, the greatest slaughters, the most demented rivalries of ideology, without, it seems, turning a hair. Matisse never made a didactic painting or signed a manifesto, and there is scarcely one reference to a political event - let alone an expression of political opinion - to be found anywhere in his writings. Perhaps Matisse did suffer from fear and loathing like the rest of us, but there is no trace of them in his work. His studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse's work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, scaled away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem L'Invitation al Voyag:

Furniture gleaming with the sheen of years would grace our bedroom; the rarest flowers, mingling their odours with vague whiffs of amber, the painted ceilings, the fathomless mirrors, the splendour of the East ... all of that would speak, in secret, to our souls, in its gentle language. There, everything is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure.

"In its thoughtfulness, steady development, benign lucidity, and wide range of historical sources, Matisse's work utterly refutes the notion that the great discoveries of modernism were made by violently rejecting the past. His work was grounded in tradition - and in a much less restless and ironic approach to it than Picasso's. As a young man, having been a student of Odilon Redon's, he had closely studied the work of Manet and Cézanne; a small Cézanne Bathers, which he bought in 1899, became his talisman. Then around 1904 he got interested in the coloured dots of Seurat's Divisionism. Seurat was long dead by then, but Matisse became friends with his closest follower, Paul Signac. Signac's paintings of Saint-Tropez bay were an important influence on Matisse's work. So, perhaps, was the painting that Signac regarded as his masterpiece and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1895, In the Time of Harmony, a big allegorical composition setting forth his anarchist beliefs. The painting shows a Utopian Arcadia of relaxation and farming by the sea, and it may have fused with the traditional fête champétre in Matisse's mind to produce his own awkward but important demonstration piece, Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-5. In it, Matisse's literary interest in Baudelaire merged with his Arcadian fantasies, perhaps under the promptings of Signac's table-talk about the future Golden Age. One sees a picnic by the sea at Saint-Tropez, with a lateen-rigged boat and a cluster of bulbous, spotty nudes. It is not, to put it mildly, a very stirring piece of luxe, but it was Matisse's first attempt to make an image of the Mediterranean as a state of mind.

"In 1905 Matisse went south again, to work with André Derain in the little coastal town of Collioure. At this point, his colour broke free. Just how free it became can be seen in The Open Window, Collioure, 1905. It is the first of the views through a window that would recur as a favourite Matissean motif. All the colour has undergone an equal distortion and keying up. The terracotta of flowerpots and the rusty red of masts and furled sails become a blazing Indian red: the reflections of the boats, turning at anchor through the razzle of light on the water, are pink; the green of the left wall, reflected in the open glazed door on the right, is heightened beyond expectation and picked up in the sky's tints. And the brushwork has a eupeptic, take-it-or-leave-it quality that must have seemed to deny craft even more than the comparatively settled way that Derain, his companion, was painting.

"The new Matisses, seen in the autumn of 1905, were very shocking indeed. Even their handful of defenders were uncertain about them, while their detractors thought them barbaric. Particularly offensive was his use of this discordant colour in the familiar form of the salon portrait - even though the "victim" was his wife, posing in her best Edwardian hat.

"There was some truth, if a very limited truth, to the cries of barbarism. Time and again, Matisse set down an image of a pre-civilized world, Eden before the Fall, inhabited by men and women with no history, languid as plants or energetic as animals. Then, as now, this image held great appeal for the over-civilized, and one such man was Matisse's biggest patron, the Moscow industrialist Sergey Shchukin, who at regular intervals would descend on Paris and clean his studio out. The relationship between Shchukin and Matisse, like the visits of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe to France, was one of the components of a Paris-Moscow axis that would be destroyed forever by the Revolution. Shchukin commissioned Matisse to paint two murals for the grand staircase of his house in Moscow, the Trubetskoy Palace. Their themes were "Dance" and "Music".

"Even when seen in a neutral museum setting, seventy years later, the primitive look of these huge paintings is still unsettling. On the staircase of the Trubetskoy Palace, they must have looked excessively foreign. Besides, to imagine their impact, one must remember the social structure that went with the word "Music" in late tsarist Russia. Music pervaded the culture at every level, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg it was the social art par excellence. Against this atmosphere of social ritual, glittering and adulatory, Matisse set his image of music at its origins - enacted not by virtuosi with managers and diamond studs but by five naked cavemen, pre-historical, almost presocial. A reed flute, a crude fiddle, the slap of hand on skin: it is a long way from the world of first nights, sables, and droshkies. Yet Matisse's editing is extraordinarily powerful; in allotting each of the elements, earth, sky, and body, its own local colour and nothing more, he gives the scene a riveting presence. Within that simplicity, boundless energy is discovered. The Dance is one of the few wholly convincing images of physical ecstasy made in the twentieth century. Matisse is said to have got the idea for it in Collioure in 1905, watching some fishermen and peasants on the beach in a circular dance called a sardana. But the sardana is a stately measure, and The Dance is more intense. That circle of stamping, twisting maenads takes you back down the line, to the red-figure vases of Mediterranean antiquity and, beyond them, to the caves. It tries to represent motions as ancient as dance itself.

"The other side of this coin was an intense interest in civilized craft. Matisse loved pattern, and pattern within pattern: not only the suave and decorative forms of his own compositions but also the reproduction of tapestries, embroideries, silks, striped awnings, curlicues, mottles, dots, and spots, the bright clutter of over-furnished rooms, within the painting. In particular he loved Islamic art, and saw a big show of it in Munich on his way back from Moscow in 1911. Islamic pattern offers the illusion of a completely full world, where everything from far to near is pressed with equal urgency against the eye. Matisse admired that, and wanted to transpose it into terms of pure colour. One of the results was The Red Studio, 1911.

"On one hand, he wants to bring you into this painting: to make you fall into it, like walking through the looking-glass. Thus the box of crayons is put, like a bait, Just under your hand, as it was under his. But it is not a real space, and because it is all soaked in flat, subtly modulated red, a red beyond ordinary experience, dyeing the whole room, it describes itself aggressively as fiction. It is all inlaid pattern, full of possible "windows," but these openings are more flat surfaces. They are Matisse's own pictures. Everything else is a work of art or craft as well: the furniture, the dresser, the clock and the sculptures, which are also recognizably Matisses. The only hint of nature in all this is the trained houseplant, which obediently emulates the curve of the wicker chair on the right and the nude's body on the left. The Red Studio is a poem about how painting refers to itself: how art nourishes itself from other art and how, with enough conviction, art can form its own republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world - a paradise.

"This belief in the utter self-sufficiency of painting is why Matisse could ignore the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When the war broke out in 1914, he was forty-five - too old to fight, too wise to imagine that his art could interpose itself between history and its victims, and too certain of his alms as an artist to change them. Through the war years, stimulated by a trip to North Africa, his art grew in amplitude and became more abstract, as in The Moroccans, 1916. In 1917 he moved, more or less permanently, to the South of France. "In order to paint my pictures," he remarked, "I need to remain for several days in the same state of mind, and I do not find this in any atmosphere but that of the C魌e d'Azur." He found a vast apartment in a white Edwardian wedding cake above Nice, the Hótel Regina. This was the Great Indoors, whose elements appear in painting after painting: the wrought-iron balcony, the strip of blue Mediterranean sky, the palm, the shutters. Matisse once said that he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair on a tired businessman. In the 1960s, when we all believed art could still change the world, this seemed a limited aim, but in fact one can only admire Matisse's common sense. He, at least, was under no illusions about his audience. He knew that an educated bourgeoisie was the only audience advanced art could claim, and history has shown him right..."

1. Goldfish and Sculpture

     by Henri Matisse  76.2 x 99.1 cm

2. Le Negresse

     by Henri Matisse  121.9 x 99.1 cm

3. Olibet

     by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

4. Blue Nude with Green Stockings

     by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

5. Woman's Face

     by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

6. Nu Bleu II

     by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

7. Beasts of the Sea

     by Henri Matisse  58.4 x 73.7 cm

8. Portrait of a Woman with a Hood

     by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 99.1 cm

9. Goldfish

     by Henri Matisse  61.0 x 81.3 cm

10. Still Life

      by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

11. Jeune Fille avec Tiare

      by Henri Matisse  81.3 x 61.0 cm

12. Blue Nude with Green Stockings

      by Henri Matisse  61.0 x 81.3 cm

13. King's Sadness, c.1952

      by Henri Matisse  101.6 x 71.1 cm

14. Dance

      by Henri Matisse  99.1 x 71.1 cm

15. Nude with Bracelet

      by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

16. Creole Dancer, c.1947

      by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 99.1 cm

17. Femme A L'amphore

      by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 101.6 cm

18. Nu Bleu I, c.1952

      by Henri Matisse  71.1 x 99.1 cm