One spring morning while walking to Pablo Picasso’s studio, Henri Matisse couldn’t help but notice the new graffiti scrawled across Montmartre’s open-air urinals —
House painters, stay away from Matisse!
Matisse has done more harm than an epidemic!
As it happened, someone had posted flyers warning house painters about white lead, an ingredient in paint that may cause brain damage. A local wag replaced the words “white lead” with “Matisse” on every handbill.
Matisse disrupts the art world
Some months prior at the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition held at the Grand Palais, Matisse stunned Parisians with his audacious new style.
The critics struggled to even categorize his work. Is the brushwork excessively emotional or is it devoid of feeling? Too messy or too perfunctory?
Matisse, for his part, never intended to be provocative:
To me, the Impressionist aesthetic seemed just as insufficient as the techniques in the Louvre. So I asked myself, “What do I want?” For a brief time I just wanted to exalt all the colors together, sacrificing none of them.
Henri Matisse, the “Art News” interview, 1951
Undeterred by the public backlash, Matisse leaned into his vibrant vision. He was joined by André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together with a handful of other artists, they boldly liberated color from its obligation to be realistic. Critic Louis Vauxcelles branded them les fauves (the wild beasts), and the name stuck. Matisse was crowned king of the wild things.
Alarmed that his work was being dismissed as a joke, he publicly defended his basic tenets:
I dream of an art of balance, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter….a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Henry Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” published in The Grand Review, December 25, 1908
By likening his paintings to a comfortable armchair, Matisse unwittingly handed critics the means to dismiss his work as mere decoration, better suited for textiles than gallery walls.
Matisse is less a pictorial artist than a designer of stuff to be sold by the yard. When blown to mural dimensions, his work is nothing but leaping silhouettes and empty gestures lacking in human significance.
Art critic Thomas Craven, “New York Herald Tribune,” 1933
In an attempt to reupholster that armchair metaphor, Matisse later characterized his work as a “translucent setting for the mind.” Viewed from this perspective, Interior at Nice is more than a hotel room on the French Riviera. It’s your moment of Zen.
If you’re anxious, what do you paint?
If you’re Matisse, you paint simple pleasures to quiet your worried mind. Does this mean he’s not a sufficiently serious artist?
“Anyone who thinks so must have a low opinion of joy,” replied art critic Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker magazine.
Matisse is almost always photographed in a business suit, leading some historians to wrongly assume he prioritized commerce over creativity. In reality, the opposite is true. His formal attire was a mask, providing a sense of privacy while he pioneered some of the most radical shifts in modern art.
Matisse was a passionate man. Painting devoured him. It 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
Picasso, who deeply admired the paintings of Matisse, often visited the older man in his studio to see what he was up to. The two lifelong friends and rivals often explored the same themes in their work.
(R) Henri Matisse, Reader on a Black Background (1939)
In Picasso’s painting Woman with a Book, a young woman sits in a comfortable armchair, holding a book that she isn’t reading. Instead, she’s seducing the artist in a manner that is all too credible. Picasso had a habit of confusing painting with keeping a diary.
By comparison, I don’t detect the same level of self-centeredness in Matisse’s Reader on a Black Background. The woman is sitting in a comfortable armchair, lost in the text or her own thoughts. Behind her, the intense 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 is like a lullaby.
Art critic John Berger, “Selected Essays,” 1954
So why aren’t we bored by Matisse?
Picasso and Matisse endured two world wars and the Great Depression. Yet, where Picasso’s work leans toward the cynical, Matisse offers rejuvenation. He painted moments of repose in order to catch his breath before returning to the turmoils of life. He craved peace of mind and wished to bestow it on the viewer.
His intense feelings are, in a way, why we’re still looking at Matisse. Because although his paintings look very beautiful, 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, integrates ideas that were on his mind for most of his working life.
The dominant black shape represents the artist sitting in a good armchair, surrounded by the simple pleasures he will miss dearly: family, friends, music, flowers. So much joy radiates from this collage of pre-painted cutouts, I forgot for a moment that he was bedridden with abdominal cancer while making it.
None of us can say what would have happened if Matisse had abandoned art to become a troubadour. But I have a feeling 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
Postscript: If you happen to be in Paris…
Explore “Matisse: 1941-1954” at the Grand Palais in Paris now thru July 26, 2026. This landmark exhibition illuminates the artist’s final years through more than 300 works, including paintings, drawings, cutouts, textiles, books, and stained glass.