Matisse spent half a century working out a single ambition — a painting of pure pictorial harmony, rooted in color, freed from descriptive obligation, and addressed to the eye and the spirit at once — and his final achievement, the Vence chapel and the cut-outs that surround it, is the fullest answer to that ambition in twentieth-century art.
Matisse came to art late by his contemporaries' standards. The legal training he completed before his twenty-first year was the path his family had set for him, and his decision to abandon it for painting — taken during a long recovery from appendicitis — was both a personal break and the beginning of one of the most disciplined careers in modern art. His early years in Paris involved the conventional academic training of the period: drawing from the antique, copying in the Louvre, and the long process of learning under teachers who, in some cases, deliberately encouraged each student to find his own direction.
The decisive move was his summer of 1904 in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac, where he absorbed the Neo-Impressionist treatment of color, followed by the Collioure summer with Derain the following year. The paintings that resulted broke decisively from the tonal habits of nineteenth-century European painting and proposed instead a new use of saturated, non-descriptive color as the structural basis of a picture.
The Fauvist period was brief, but the principle it established — that the picture is built from color and the relationships between colors rather than from line, modeling, or perspectival space — became the consistent foundation of the rest of Matisse's career. The years between 1908 and 1917 produced the great early masterpieces: The Joy of Life, The Dance, Music, The Red Studio, The Conversation, the Moroccan paintings, and the long sequence of windows and interiors. The 1908 essay Notes d'un peintre set out the artistic program in his own words. By the outbreak of the First World War he was, with Picasso, the most internationally recognized European painter of his generation.
His move to Nice at the end of the war began a long second phase. The light and atmosphere of the Côte d'Azur, the rented hotel rooms and apartments turned into temporary studios, the long sequence of female figures in patterned interiors — the so-called Nice odalisques — became the basis of two decades of work that some critics took for retreat and others for the deepest extension of the early Fauvist project into a new register of intimacy and decorative subtlety. He extended the work into murals (the Barnes Foundation Dance), illustrated books (Mallarmé, Joyce, Baudelaire), and a long sequence of drawings and prints that ran in close parallel to his painting.
The final phase of his career was conditioned by serious illness. A 1941 operation for abdominal cancer left him largely bedbound or wheelchair-bound, and the practical limitations of that condition produced his most original late idiom: the gouache-painted papers cut directly with scissors, pinned to the wall, and arranged into compositions of pure colour and silhouette. The decade of cut-outs that followed — Jazz, the Blue Nudes, The Sorrow of the King, The Parakeet and the Mermaid — and the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, designed in its entirety from the stained glass to the chasubles to the tiled black-line drawings, constituted the closing statement of his life. His position in twentieth-century art has remained settled at the highest level since his death; the body of work he left, across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, design, illustration, and architectural commission, is among the most coherent and most influential single careers in modern art.