Mouvement artistique henri matisse biography for students

Over a six-decade career, artist Henri Matisse worked in all media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking. Although his subjects were traditional—nudes, figures in landscapes, portraits, interior views—his revolutionary use of brilliant color and exaggerated form to express emotion made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Henri Matisse was born on December 31, , and was raised in the small industrial town of Bohain-en-Vermandois in northern France. His family worked in the grain business. As a young man, Matisse worked as a legal clerk and then studied for a law degree in Paris from to Returning to a position in a law office in the town of Saint-Quentin, he began taking a drawing class in the mornings before he went to work.

When he was 21, Matisse began painting while recuperating from an illness, and his vocation as an artist was confirmed. In , Matisse moved to Paris for artistic training. In , he had his first one-man exhibition at the gallery of dealer Ambroise Vollard. Matisse had a major creative breakthrough in and Painting in the style that came to be known as Fauvism, Matisse continued to emphasize the emotional power of sinuous lines, strong brushwork and acid-bright colors in works such as The Joy of Life , a large composition of female nudes in a landscape.

In the first decade of the century, Matisse also made sculptures and drawings that were sometimes related to his paintings, always repeating and simplifying his forms to their essence.

Henri matisse art style

After finding his own style, Matisse enjoyed a greater degree of success. He bought a large studio in a suburb of Paris and signed a contract with the prestigious art dealers of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. In his works of the s and s, Matisse continued to delight and surprise his viewers with his signature elements of saturated colors, flattened pictorial space, limited detail and strong outlines.

In , Matisse began spending winters on the Mediterranean, and in , he moved to the city of Nice on the French Riviera.