Henri Matisse – Themes et Variations – Frontispiece

Description

Henri Matisse, Themes et Variations – Frontispiece is an original Linocut on wove paper with wide margins. Created as the frontispiece of illustrated book ‘Drawings- Themes and Variations’ published by Martin Fabiani. Edition size: 950. Duthuit 9.

Henri Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Throughout his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, Henri Matisse continuously searched, in his own words, “for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.”1 Celebrated as both an orchestrator of tonal harmonies and a draftsman capable of distilling a form to its essentials, he long sought a way to unite color and line in his work. The relationship between these two formal elements can be traced from early works like Dance (I)—in which the side of a dancer’s body, set against fields of rich blue and green, is described in a single, arcing contour—to his late cut-outs like The Swimming Pool, in which the artist discovered a way at the end of his life to “cut directly into vivid color.”

Henri Matisse, Themes et Variations – Frontispiece