Nataliart

In 1951, when he had just completed the last major project of his life, the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, Matisse summed up close on fifty years of work in these few words: "For me this chapel is the culmination of an entire working life and the flowering of a huge effort that has been heartfelt and arduous."

The only working life of an artist to match his in longevity was that of his contemporary, Picasso. But unlike the latter, Matisse produced an oeuvre subservient to a single idea: the search for a balance of colors and forms; by the end of his life, he succeeded in imprinting this upon matter, though, as he himself made plain, it was not without effort.

Indeed we learn from Matisse that from the first picture that got him noticed, Luxe, calme et volupté, in 1904, all the way to the chapel at Vence, the simplicity, freshness and the immediately striking brilliance that characterize his work came into being only as a result of much deep thought.

In order to reconcile color with drawing through his gouache-painted cutouts, he had to deploy sculpture and flatness of color in turn, in other words abstracting color from design and vice versa, so as to circumscribe their respective potencies.

So that "art and decoration" would be "just one and the same thing", he studied architecture and saw how painting can transfigure it. Finally, for painting to become that "art of balance, purity and serenity, with no troubling or disquieting subjects, so that for any mental worker, for example the businessman just as much as the artistic man of letters, it can be a soothing influence on the brain, rather the way a good armchair gives him relaxation from physical tiredness" (as he observed in 1908), Matisse pursued his original intuition through the great currents of art history over half a century: divisionism, fauvism and abstraction - without ever getting lost.

He had to travel a great deal too: to Brittany and the south of France, opening himself to Eastern influences on a trip to Morocco, visiting America and Oceania.

At the end of this odyssey through color and ornamentalism, for the artists of the generation that came after him, both in the US and in Europe, Matisse became what André Masson called "the oasis of Matisse"; for the American abstract painters of the Fifties and Sixties, from Rothko to Kelly, from Sam Francis to Robert Motherwell; for Hantaï and Viallat in France in the Sixties - all of whom drew their source of inspiration from the freshness of his creation.