Monday Morning Museum: Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse

Portrait of Henri Matisse, 20 May 1933 by Carl Van Vechten

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse – Friday 31 December 1869 Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France to Wednesday 3 November 1954 Nice, France

French Fauvist Painter and Sculptor

Icarus, 1947

"This bold and playful image is one of twenty plates Matisse created to illustrate his groundbreaking book "Jazz." The illustrations derive from maquettes of cut and pasted colored papers, which were then printed using a stencil technique known as "pochoir." Here, the mythological figure Icarus is presented in a simplified form floating against a royal blue nighttime sky. Matisse's flat, abstracted forms and large areas of pure color marked an important change in the direction of his later work and ultimately influenced "hard-edge" artists of the 1960s like Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held." – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – John Smibert
Next Monday’s Artist – Richard Wilson

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent