The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (304 page)

(active mid 14th cent.).
Bohemian painter. He was first head of the painter's guild in Prague, founded in 1348, and was painter to the emperor Charles IV between 1359 and 1367. For Charles he decorated the Holy Cross Chapel of Karlstein Castle near Prague with more than a hundred panels of saints, prophets, and angels, most of them still in
situ
. He shows even more clearly than the
Master of Vy
i Brod
the evolution of a distinct Bohemian School from Italian and French antecedents.

 
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(active late 12th cent.).
Spanish
Romanesque
sculptor and architect responsible for the Portico de la Gloria, signed and dated 1188, at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. A huge composition featuring a triple doorway, this is the greatest work of Spanish sculpture of this period.

 
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(1921– ).
French painter. In the 1950s he gained an international reputation as one of the leading exponents of expressive abstraction. This was partly because of a flair for publicly that has led to him being described as ‘the Salvador
Dalí
of
Art Informel
’. He works rapidly, often on a large scale with sweeping impulsive gestures, sometimes squeezing paint straight from the tube on to the canvas. He has even painted, dressed in armour, in front of an audience. He has writen several books expanding the theories behind his paintings.

 
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(1869–1954).
French painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. From about 1920 he enjoyed an international reputation alongside
Picasso
as the foremost painter of his time, and for sensitivity of line and beauty of colouring he was unrivalled among his contemporaries. In 1891 he abandoned a legal career for painting. Initially he produced still lifes and landscapes in a sober range of colour, but in the summer of 1896, painting in Brittany, he began to adopt the lighter palette of the
Impressionists
. In 1899 he began to experiment with the
Neo-Impressionist
technique, which he still used five years later in one of his first major works—the celebrated
Luxe, calme et volupté
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1904–5), exhibited at the
Salon
des Indépendants in 1905 and bought by
Signac
. During the same years he had been painting with
Marquet
, had met
Derain
and through him
Vlaminck
, and in 1905, together with these and other friends from student days, he took part in the sensational exhibition at the
Salon d'Automne
that give birth to the name
Fauves
. In the same year (Matisse's
annus mirabilis
) he acquired his first important patrons—the expatriate Americans Gertrude, Leo, and Michael
Stein
—and they were soon followed by others. Previously he had struggled to earn a living, but he was now freed from financial worries and could afford to travel. His growing reputation also attracted many pupils to the art school he ran in Paris from 1907 to 1911.
Matisse had met Picasso as early as 1906, and like him was excited by African sculpture at this time. Although he never allied himself with the
Cubists
, he was influenced by their work in the second decade of the century, when he painted some of his most austere and formal pictures (
Bathers by a River
, Art Institute of Chicago, 1916–17). In the 1920s, however, he returned to the luminous serenity that characterized his work for the rest of his long career. From 1916 he spent most of his winters on the Riviera, mainly at Nice and also at Vence. The luxuriously sensual works he painted there—odalisques, still lifes of tropical fruits and flowers, and glowing interiors—are irradiated with the strong sun and rich colours of the south. Following two major operations for duodenal cancer in 1941, Matisse was confined to bed or a wheelchair, but he worked until the end of his life and one of his greatest and most original works was created in 1949–51, when he was in his eighties. This is the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, a gift of thanksgiving for a woman who had nursed him after his operations then become a nun at this Dominican convent. Matisse designed every detail, including the priests' vestments. The stained-glass windows show his familiar love of colour, but the walls feature murals of pure white ceramic tiles decorated with black line drawings of inspired simplicity. Matisse was not a believer, but he created here one of the most moving religious buildings of the 20th cent. and expressed what he called ‘the nearly religious feeling I have for life’.
In his bedridden final years Matisse also embarked on another kind of highly original work, using brightly coloured cut-out paper shapes (
gouaches découpées
) arranged into purely abstract patterns (
L'Escargot
, Tate Gallery, London, 1953). ‘The paper cut-out’, he said, ‘allows me to draw in the colour. It is a simplification for me. Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it—the one modifying the other—I draw straight into the colour.’ The colours he used in his cut-outs were often so strong that his doctor advised him to wear dark glasses. They must rank among the most joyous works ever created by an artist in old age. Unlike many of his great contemporaries, Matisse did not attempt to express in his work the troubled times through which he lived. ‘What I dream of’, he wrote, ‘is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject-matter…like a comforting influence, a mental balm—something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue.’
Matisse made sculptures at intervals throughout his career, the best known probably being the four bronzes called
The Back I-IV
(casts in the Tate and elsewhere, 1909–
c.
1929), in which he progressively removed all detail, paring the figure down to massively simple forms. He also designed sets and costumes for
Diaghilev
and was a brilliant book illustrator. His work is represented in most important collections of modern art, the finest holdings being at the
Barnes
Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, the Hermitage, St Petersburg , and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. There are also Matisse museums in Le Cateau (his birthplace) and Nice.