One spring day in 1906, Henri Matisse was walking through the Paris neighborhood of Montmartre on his way to visit Pablo Picasso when he noticed all the sidewalk urinals were covered with the same rude graffiti:

“House painters, stay away from Matisse!”

“Matisse has done more harm in a year than an epidemic!”

“Matisse causes insanity!”

A group of house painters had posted leaflets denouncing white lead, an ingredient in paint that could cause brain damage. A local wag replaced the words “white lead” with “Matisse” on every handbill.

Matisse really irked some people

The response to his new paintings at the Salon d’Automne exhibition in 1905 had been vicious. In a flood of contradictions, bewildered critics called Matisse both overly emotional and devoid of feeling, too mechanical and too sloppy. Matisse didn’t intend to create controversy:

The Impressionists’s aesthetic seemed just as insufficient to me as the techniques of the Louvre. So I asked myself, “What do I want?” For a brief time, I just wanted to exalt all colors together, sacrificing none of them.

Henri Matisse, Art News interview, 1951

Matisse painted in this manner for three years. So did André Derain and a dozen other artists. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles referred to them collectively as les fauves (the wild beasts) and the epithet stuck. Their unruly brushwork became known as Fauvism and Matisse was crowned king of the wild things.

Alarmed that his work was being dismissed as a joke, the artist publicly defended his basic tenets:

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter….a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henry Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” 1908

Unfortunately, the phrase “like a good armchair” was co-opted by critics who described Matisse’s paintings as nothing more than simple-minded decorations for the haute bourgeoise.

Matisse is less a pictorial artist than a designer for stuffs to be sold by the yard. The larger his canvases, the more vapid he becomes; and when blown to mural dimensions, his work is nothing but leaping silhouettes and empty gestures lacking in human significance.

Thomas Craven, New York Herald Tribune, 1933

“I try to create a translucent setting for the mind,” explained Matisse. In other words, Interior at Nice isn’t an empty hotel room on the French Riviera. It’s your moment of Zen.

Is pleasure a serious subject?

If you suffer from chronic anxiety, what do you paint? If you’re Matisse, you paint desperate snatches of happiness in order to quiet your worried mind.

Does it mean he wasn’t serious enough as an artist? “Anyone who thinks so must have a low opinion of joy,” said New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

In photographs, Matisse is always buttoned up in a suit, and people have deduced from it that he was dull and timid and relatively shallow. Matisse is the exact opposite.

He was a very passionate man. Painting devoured him, it ate him up, and it also tormented him. He couldn’t sleep, he had nightmares, he had panic attacks. His life was never easy or simple or comfortable at all.

Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling, The Charlie Rose Show, 2006

One person who never made the mistake of underrating Matisse was Pablo Picasso, who kept stopping by the older man’s studio to see what he was up to. Initially, Matisse was ahead of Picasso in creative audacity. Sometimes they painted the same subject.

In Picasso’s Woman with a Book, a young woman is sitting in a good armchair. Notice she’s holding a book, but she’s not reading it. She’s seducing the artist, in a manner that is all too credible.

In Matisse’s picture, we don’t sense the self-enthrallment that is so common in Picasso’s work. In Reader Against a Black Background, a woman is reading or perhaps her thoughts have turned inward. Behind her, the luminous black wall somehow conveys both anxiety and tenderness.

If you have never painted, you cannot fully appreciate what lies behind Matisse’s mastery of pure color. It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture either by allowing one color to dominate or by muting all the colors. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colors together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

John Berger, “Selected Essays,” 1954

Why aren’t we bored by Matisse?

Picasso and Matisse lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and unprecedented urbanization. Picasso’s work is often cynical. Matisse’s work is rejuvenating. He painted moments of repose to catch his breath before returning to the turmoils of life. “Peace of mind” is what he craved and what he wanted to bestow on the rest of us.

Matisse’s intense feelings are, in a way, why we’re still looking at his paintings. Because although they look so beautiful….they are brilliantly colored paintings of great balance and serenity….there are depths behind them.

Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling, The Charlie Rose Show, 2006

Matisse died in 1954. His final self-portrait, The Sorrows of the King, synthesizes concepts that were in his mind for most of his working life. The central black form represents Matisse sitting in a good armchair, surrounded by the pleasures he will miss dearly: family, flowers, sunlight, music. So much joy rises and radiates from this scene, I forgot for a moment that Matisse was bedridden with abdominal cancer and exhaustion.

None of us can say what would have happened if Matisse had abandoned art to become a troubadour, but I have a hunch his lyrics would have sounded something like this:

And I thought to myself
Wouldn’t it be great
Wouldn’t it be great if just for one moment
Everything was all right

I would give this to you, baby
I would give you a moment
Where everything’s good
Everything’s safe
Everything’s warm
A moment where everything is all right

“Mystic Eyes” by Van Morrison, additional lyrics by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers