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Struggle for the Minimum. A meticulous dandy, Matisse wears a light tweed jacket and tie when he is painting. Never using a palette, he squeezes the colors on to plain white kitchen dishes and uses them just as they come out of the tube, except for the addition of a little turpentine. Each picture starts with a fairly detailed charcoal sketch; he gradually simplifies it as he paints. This process of simplification, he says, is the very symbol of his life: "A constant struggle for complete expression with a minimum of elements."
An iron bedstead takes up most of the space in Matisse's bedroom, where he spends his afternoons drawing and making cutouts on a breakfast tray. At either side of the bed is a revolving table with drawers printed in chalk, "Pencils," "Pens," "Scissors," "Paper," etc.
Abstractions made of pinned scraps of colored paper (see cuts) cover the bedroom walls. To the hasty eye, they might seem as inconsequential as a game, but Matisse himself is deeply proud of them. "Only when one has reached complete maturity and mastery of color," he explains, "is it possible to do anything like these. They might be compared to direct carving in sculpture—the same thing accomplished in color that Michelangelo did in stone. They are the result of my long career."
That career started with years of severe schooling, during which Matisse supported himself by copying old masters in the Louvre. ("One must learn to walk firmly on the ground," he told his own students later, "before one tries the tightrope.") When he married at 23, Matisse was considered a rising young academician. Soon afterward, he ruined his reputation; he willfully destroyed a perfectly adequate still life he had just finished instead of sending it to his dealer. "It did not represent me," explained Matisse. "I count my emancipation from that day."
Sticks of Dynamite. To represent himself better, he took the brightest paints he could find and laid them on in exuberant stabs and slashes. His friend Derain called Matisse's colors "so many sticks of dynamite," and in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1905 the stuff exploded. Matisse's paintings had been put in the same room with those of other crazy young men: Rouault, Dufy, Derain and Vlaminck. Almost everyone who peeked into that room came away reeling with outrage. The new painters were just fauves, they decided—wild beasts—and Henri Matisse the wildest of all.
His wife had to open a hat store to support Matisse and their three children, but it did not stay open long; by 1908 buyers had begun to see the beauty of the beast's work. In that year he published his ambiguous Notes of a Painter, which have been quoted as his final word ever since. "What I dream of," he wrote, "is an art that is equilibrated, pure and calm, free of disturbing subject matter ... a means of soothing the soul . . . like a comfortable armchair. . . ." That simile has led critics to expect far less of Matisse than he expected of himself.