How Henri Matisse broke through convention and creative blocks
At 60, Henri Matisse was confronted by every artist’s worst fear. Despite making a splash in Paris by embracing the bold colours and flat forms of fauvism, he was crippled by a creative block. His critics had decided he had already descended into self-parody, and the artist began to think the same. He tried to reignite his creative spark by continually painting female models, but his unique sense of style had begun to dwindle.
It was a startling position, considering he had brought modernism to the forefront of French art, encouraging countless other artists to abandon the painstaking realism Impressionism demanded. In its place, Matisse used clashing blocks of colour, the shape and contours of his subjects almost secondary to their bold shades. Exasperated, he wrote to his daughter in 1929. “I have sat down several times to do some [painting],” he wrote, “But in front of the canvas, I am at a loss for ideas.”
Returning to his earlier work was what inspired his renegade vision to blossom again. Matisse had gone to visit art collector Albert Barnes a year after sending his daughter that letter, and Barnes delicately confirmed his fears. His recent fixation with painting models was provocative and appealing, he said, but not in the revolutionary sense he was capable of. Barnes offered him a commission, a huge piece, bold enough to command space above the arches of his gallery, which wound up being 45ft wide.
It was quick to inspire change in Matisse because he had never created anything so large, and he knew he needed to paint something electrifying to fill the space. With Barnes’ advice ringing in the back of his head, he returned to his earlier work for inspiration. In 1909, The Dance I marked his first pivot towards a more simple style of painting, with legible forms but a focus on emotion that transcended realism.
The Joy of Life was another crucial early work he revisited, which prompted him to recreate the small group of dancers. He tried using photographs and sketches to get to grips with the oversized canvas, eventually having to rent a garage big enough to work on it. The main difficulty was he needed to sketch out a rough idea of the forms, but the sheer size of the canvas made it hard to wipe away mistakes.
He abandoned the usual tools of oil paints and brushes and took to using a long stick of bamboo with a pencil attached to help him sketch. He also tried cutting large pieces of paper and pinned them to the canvas to help him gauge the proportions a bit better. The infamous cutouts he later became famous for were ushered in by this era of experimenting, which took Matisse three consecutive years.
Those years were a crucial turning point for Matisse, culminating in not only his seminal work, The Dance II, but a long-overdue return to a daring modernist style. “It has a splendour that one can’t imagine unless one sees it because both the whole ceiling and its arched vaults come alive through radiation, and the main effect continues right down to the floor,” wrote Matisse in a 1933 letter to his son. A far cry from the disillusioned words penned years earlier to his daughter, he concluded: “I am profoundly tired but very pleased.”
