February 25, 2025
How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment with His Daring Use of Color

Even the ones folks now not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-versed in artwork his­to­ry have heard of a paint­ing taste known as fau­vism — and prob­a­bly have nev­er con­sid­ered what it has to do with fauve, the French phrase for a wild beast. Actually, the 2 have each­factor to do with one anoth­er, a minimum of within the sense of ways cer­tain crit­ics regard­ed cer­tain artists within the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some of the notable of the ones artists used to be Chicken­ri Matisse, who because the finish of the 9­teenth cen­tu­ry were explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of his deci­sion to “lean into the dra­mat­ic pow­er of col­or,” as Evan “Nerd­creator” Puschak places it in the brand new video above.

It used to be Matis­se’s uncon­ven­tion­al use of col­or, emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful however now not strict­ly actual­is­tic, that even­tu­al­ly were given him categorised a wild beast. Even earlier than that, in his well-known 1904 Luxe, Calme et Volup­té, which has its ori­gins in a keep in St. Tropez, you’ll “really feel Matisse forg­ing his personal trail. His col­ors are rebelling in opposition to their sub­jects. The paint­ing is anar­elegant, fan­tas­ti­cal. It’s puls­ing with wild ener­gy.” He con­tin­ued this paintings on a commute to the south­ern fish­ing vil­lage of Col­lioure, “or even after greater than a cen­tu­ry, the paint­ings that outcome­ed “nonetheless retain their defi­ant pow­er; the col­ors nonetheless sing with the dar­ing, the cre­ative reck­much less­ness of that sum­mer.”

In essence, what surprised about Matisse and the oth­er fau­vists’ artwork used to be its sub­sti­tu­tion of objec­tiv­i­ty with sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, maximum understand­ably in its col­ors, however in sub­tler ele­ments as nicely. Because the years went on — with sup­port com­ing from now not the estab­lish­ment however far-sight­ed col­lec­tors — Matisse “discovered use col­or to outline shape itself,” cre­at­ing paint­ings that “expressed deep, pri­mal really feel­ings and rhythms.”  This evo­lu­tion cul­mi­nat­ed in Los angeles Danse, whose “surprise­ing scar­let” used to ren­der “bare, danc­ing, bounce­ing, spin­ning fig­ures who’re much less like peo­ple than mytho­log­i­cal satyrs” drew harsh­er oppro­bri­um than any­factor he’d proven earlier than.

However then, “you’ll’t be expecting the instan­ta­neous accep­tance of a few­factor rad­i­cal­ly new. If it used to be settle for­ed, it could­n’t be rad­i­cal.” Nowadays, “know­ing the direc­tions that mod­ern artwork went in, we now can appre­ci­ate the overall sig­nif­i­cance of Matis­se’s paintings. We will be able to be surprised at it with­out being scan­dal­ized.” And we will be able to rec­og­nize that he dis­cov­ered a uni­ver­sal­ly res­o­nant aes­thet­ic that almost all of his con­tem­po­raries did­n’t below­stand —  or a minimum of it sort of feels that method to me, greater than a cen­tu­ry lat­er and at the oth­er aspect of the sector, the place his artwork now enjoys the sort of broad attraction that it ornaments the iced-cof­charge bot­tles at con­ve­nience shops.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Chicken­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Pay attention Gertrude Stein Learn Works Impressed by way of Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Chicken­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Why Georges Seurat’s Pointil­listing Paint­ing A Solar­day After­midday at the Island of Los angeles Grande Jat­te Is a Mas­ter­piece

When Chicken­ri Matisse Was once 83 Years Outdated, He Couldn’t Cross to His Favourite Swim­ming Pool, So He Cre­at­ed a Swim­ming Pool as a Paintings of Artwork

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Paintings: Uncommon Movies of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & Extra

Based totally in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and wide­casts on towns, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks come with the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Towns and the e book The State­much less Town: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e book.


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