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Art Subject: People
Ohh Baby ! - Oversize Signed limited edition - Pop Art - Kate Moss
Located in London, GB
Ohh Baby ! - Oversize Signed limited edition - Pop Art - Kate Moss by the London based contemporary pop art image creator and artist, BATIK. Measures 30 x 20" inches / 76 x 51 cm...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Color, Archival Pigment

Winter - 21st century, Figurative Surrealist print
Located in Warsaw, PL
The work comes directly from the artist, is numbered out of limited edition of 20, signed and made on sealed paper. RAFAŁ OLBIŃSKI (born in 1943) He graduated from the Faculty of Ar...
Category

2010s Surrealist Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Color

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe Print, Invitation to the Leo Castelli Gallery, 1981
Located in Santa Monica, CA
An invitation to "Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective 1963-1981" held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, printed with the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe. Published by Caste...
Category

1980s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

Shepard Fairey Screen Print Protect Biodiversity - Cultivate Harmony Street Art
Located in Draper, UT
Silkscreen Print on Fine Art Cream Speckletone 24 × 18 in 61 × 45.7 cm Edition of 500 Silkscreen / Graffiti and Street Art / Pop and Contemporary Pop / Cultural Commentary / Contemporary Academic Realism "The Earth's eco-system is beautifully complex but fragile. Biodiversity is essential to maintain the delicate balance our world needs to remain healthy. 68% of the Earth's species have disappeared in the last 50 years alone. Many beautiful creatures are gone forever, and each loss erodes the foundation of our eco-system. My poster...
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen

Queen Mary, Queen of England, royalty portrait engraving, circa 1780
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
'Marie' Copper-line engraving by Pierre Francois Basan (1723-1797) after Van der vaart. Mary II (1662-1694) reigned as Queen of England, Scotland, a...
Category

Late 18th Century Renaissance Portrait Prints

Materials

Engraving

The Puppet Man, 1960. E. A
Located in Miami Beach, FL
"The Puppet Man, 1960. By Alexander Calder. Handwriting by artist "EA" down left. Image size: 42.25 x 19 in. Frame size: 50.25 x 27 in. Silver Frame Ha...
Category

1660s Abstract Geometric Portrait Prints

Materials

Archival Paper, Lithograph

Framed print of May 1, 1937, "Vogue" magazine cover by Carl Erickson
Located in Boca Raton, FL
Framed print of May 1, 1937, "Vogue" magazine cover by Carl Oscar August Erickson of a woman in a salmon-colored suit playing with a dog.
Category

1930s Other Art Style Figurative Prints

Materials

Color

French Vintage Exhibition Poster for Yves Brayer - Galerie Isy Brachot Brussels
Located in London, GB
French Vintage Exhibition Poster for Yves Brayer (1964). Newly framed, the poster announces an exhibition of the works of Yves Brayer at the Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels, Belgium....
Category

1960s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Quadrille at Moulin Rouge-Poster. Copyright Haddad's Fine Arts, Inc.
Located in Clinton Township, MI
Poster. Measures 22.5 x 16.25 inches and is Unframed. Good Condition-signs of wear consistent with age and handling/pencil-mark near Title.
Category

1970s Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

18th C. Portrait of Edward Stanley from Henry VIII's Court after Holbein Drawing
Located in Alamo, CA
This is an 18th century engraved portrait of "Edward Stanley" created by Francesco Bartolozzi (1728–1815), after a drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497- 1543) in the 16th century. Holbein was the official artist in the court of King Henry VIII. Bartolozzi used both etching and stipple engraving techniques to create the work which was published by John Chamberlaine in London in 1793 in "The Book of Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein in the Collection of His Majesty". Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby...
Category

Late 18th Century Old Masters Portrait Prints

Materials

Engraving, Etching

Elmo the Mighty, the great Elmo Lincoln original lobby cartd
Located in Spokane, WA
ELMO THE MIGHTY, original 1919 lobby card, not signed. Protected in a 16" x 20" acid-free presentation mat suitable for framing. This lobby card is over 100 years old. Original,...
Category

1910s American Realist Figurative Prints

Materials

Offset

Jean-Michel Basquiat Silkscreen Monotype UNIQUE hand signed 2X by Richard Corman
Located in New York, NY
Richard Corman Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Monotype (hand signed twice by Richard Corman), 2015 Silkscreen monotype on 320 gram Coventry Rag paper with deckled edges Signed twi...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen, Monotype

CREATION Hand Drawn Lithograph, Cupped Pair of Hands, Light Glow, Meditation
Located in Union City, NJ
CREATION is a hand drawn original lithograph(not a photo reproduction or digital print) printed using hand lithography techniques on archival Arches printmaking paper 100% acid free. CREATION is a highly detailed, surreal hand portrait drawing depicting a pair of cupped hands made of stone, seemingly emitting a glow of light. CREATION with its glowing effect expressed from the center evokes a sense of mystery that captivates the viewer into another world of meditative, spiritual consciousness. Print size - 21.5 x 29.5 in., unframed, excellent condition, rare unsigned trial proof aside from the printed edition of 100, printers legend stamped on verso, fine impression, completely hand drawn lithograph by DE ES Schwertberger Year printed - 1979, printed by master printer Joseph Kleineman at JK Fine Art Editions Co., NYC DE ES (DE ES Schwertberger) - Popular Viennese Fantastic Realist artist was born in 1942 in Gresten, Lower Austria, as Dieter Schwertberger. He studied the painting technique of the Old Masters in Vienna under Ernst Fuchs and has been an independent artist since 1962. DE ES lived three years in Switzerland and twelve years in New York City. The painter has been known under the name DE ES since 1972. He currently lives in Vienna. The artist considers himself to be a seeker, who shows what he has found through “the language of the images”. His message of “meaning and transformation” finds clear and intense expression in his paintings through a precise use of space, light and texture. De Es' was the featured artist for Omni magazine...
Category

1970s Surrealist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Teddo
Located in New York, NY
This refined work on paper, entitled "Teddo" was produced by the celebrated American artist Paul Cadmus (1901-1999) in 1985. It features a nude male figure with tightly cropped hair ...
Category

1980s American Realist Nude Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original Blame it on the Movies Betty Grable Broadway vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: Blame It On The Movies!. The Reel Music of Hollywood. Theater performance of Blame it on the Movies! Acid-free archival linen-backed original; ready to frame. ...
Category

1980s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Madonna and Child-Poster. New York Graphic Society. Printed in Italy.
By Michelangelo Buonarroti
Located in Clinton Township, MI
Poster. Measures 26.75 x 18.5 inches and is Unframed. Good Condition.
Category

Late 20th Century Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

PRINCE OF CUPS 1979, Signed Lithograph on Arches, Tarot Card Series
Located in Union City, NJ
Artist - Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989) Title - PRINCE OF CUPS, Tarot Card Series Publisher - DALART N.V. Year published - 1979 Medium - Lithograph on Arches Cover 270 gsm. 100% acid free, signed in pencil, inscribed 2/5 PP (Printers Proof) by Salvador Dali on lower print margin, publishers mark "DALART N.V. Copyright 1979" blindstamp embossed on lower left print margin. Fine impression, vivid colors, unframed, in very good condition. Listed in the Albert Field's OFFICIAL CATALOGUE OF THE GRAPHIC WORKS OF SALVADOR DALI, Reference #79-15. PRINCE OF CUPS from the Tarot Series 1979, is a surrealist style limited edition lithograph by Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989) Printed on archival Arches paper, 100% acid free. PRINCE OF CUPS depicts a freely drawn, black line portrait of a young Prince wearing his golden yellow crown, sporting a white ruffle collared shirt, looking slightly sideways posed behind a golden chalice...
Category

1970s Surrealist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

"Le musiciens vagabonds" original lithograph
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: original lithograph. Printed in Paris in 1963 by the Mourlot Freres atelier. Size: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (320 x 240 mm). Not signed.
Category

1960s Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Portrait
Located in Belgrade, MT
This lithograph is a piece of my private collection from artists of the 20th Century. It is original, signed by artist and numbered 217/220. It is vibrant in color and in very good...
Category

Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Portrait Prints

Materials

Plate Glass, Oil, Lithograph, Watercolor

Owen Weiri (also Wiiri), The Coal Miner
Located in New York, NY
Owen Weiri (also Wiiri, 1916-1974) was a Finnish-American who served in the Spanish Civil War and then, during World War ll, in the American armed forces as a marine. Industrial sub...
Category

1940s Ashcan School Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching, Aquatint

Blondie Blue by BATIK signed limited edition Oversize POP ART
Located in London, GB
Blondie Blue by BATIK signed limited edition POP ART print Paper Size OVERSIZE 40 x 30" inches / 101 x 76 cm Signed & numbered by artist on front Archival Pigment print Limited to 15 only Featuring pop art artwork of the iconic Debbie Harry from pop punk band Blondie circa 1979 Note other sizes and framing options available BATIK is a London based contemporary pop artist Sex symbol glamour music artist heart of glass...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Color, Archival Pigment

Original Uncle Sam Needs that Extra Shovelful (of Coal) vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original World War 1 poster: Uncle Sam Needs That Extra Shovelful (of Coal.) If you like the Uncle Sam image, this is a good one to have. Help Unc...
Category

1910s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Cacao Van Houten original vintage French chocolate chromo-lithograph poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original CACAO VAN HOUTEN, LE Meilleur Chocolat a consommer liquide. Hot chocolate turn of the century antique vintage poster, unsigned. Pr...
Category

1890s Art Nouveau Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Red Cross Christmas Roll Call original World War 1 vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: Red Cross Christmas Roll Call. “Where Columbia sets her name let every one of you follow her” Linen-backed in very good condition, ready to frame. Artist: Edwin Howland Blashfield. The Red Cross stands on the left helping hold the banner that reads Where Columbia sets her name let every one of you follow her. December 16th to 23d. World War 1...
Category

1910s Art Nouveau Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Isolation Art: Pandemic, Surreal digital collage figurative portrait, gold frame
Located in Jersey City, NJ
"Pandemic" from the artist's Isolation Art series. Full moon rays shine behind figurative portrait of crowned and masked woman. Sky behind her with clouds and stars, mystical imagery, framed in beveled edge gold frame ABOUT THE ARTIST Deming King...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Digital

Grace Kelly
Located in Palm Beach, FL
Robin Austin has always been a storyteller – whether earlier in his career, marketing successful global companies, or as the co-founder and creative visionary of Fusion 5, a global branding firm, or now as an artist – creating a rich landscape reflecting images of our shared cultural heritage. Each signed and limited edition work is a visual celebration of the moments captured in time. The genius of Robin’s art...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Acrylic Polymer, C Print

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR "Enfants jouant à la balle"
Located in Los Angeles, CA
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) "Enfants jouant à la balle" lithograph, on laid paper with the Dambricourt Frères watermark, circa 1900, a previously unrecorded proof state before ...
Category

Early 1900s Impressionist Portrait Prints

Materials

Laid Paper, Lithograph

Aztlan low & slow
Located in Palm Springs, CA
Medium: linocut Year: 2023 Image Size: 24 x 24 inches Edition Size: 10 An hommage to the low riders of Southern California chicano car culture, complete with zoot suits, made famou...
Category

2010s Contemporary Landscape Prints

Materials

Linocut

Original "Belgium Cities of Art" vintage poster 1932
Located in Spokane, WA
Original Travel Poster for Belgium - Cities of Art signed by artist Poleff and dated 1932. The image, framed in an archway window, features a woman wearing Byzantine / Middle Ages e...
Category

1930s Gothic Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Diana - 'Stare'
Located in Norwich, GB
David Koppel served his photographic apprenticeship in the rough-and-tumble world of the Fleet Street paparazzi in 1980’s London when his skills captured the very essence of the Me Decade that gave birth to the celebrity culture of today. Koppel’s classic photographs of Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton & the Royal Family appeared in every major newspaper and magazine and marked him out as that rarity amongst press photographers: the artist with a camera. Building on the reputation gained through the photographs for the book Still Waters, his black-and-white portraits of ordinary people now rank among the many famous names in his portfolio. Koppel also went one better and in 2002 bought the St Giles St Gallery , bringing the best of local and international contemporary art and photography to Norwich, including the works of Sir Peter Blake, Terry O’Neill, David Bailey, Maggie Hambling, Storm Thorgersson, Tim Woolcock...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Black and White Photography

Materials

Black and White, Giclée, Archival Pigment

Young Boy - Original Lithograph by Jean Cocteau - 1956
Located in Roma, IT
Young Boy is an original Contemporary artwork realized by Jean Cocteau (1889 -1963) in 1956. French draftsman, poet, essayist, playwright, librettist, film director. Original colo...
Category

1950s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Beatles Yellow Submarine Pop Art Poster, Peter Max
Located in London, GB
Beatles Yellow Submarine Movie poster after Peter Max Peter Max is a German-American artist known for his colourful, psychedelic pop art, whi...
Category

1960s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Linen

Sacred Heart, by Sonia Romero
Located in Palm Springs, CA
Signed, titled and numbered by the artist. This print is currently on display at the inaugural exhibition at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. Sonia Romero is a fu...
Category

2010s Contemporary Nude Prints

Materials

Screen

Actor Portrait
Located in New York, NY
Kunisada, Utagawa. [Actor portrait.] Japan, ca. 1855. Original woodblock print.
Category

Mid-19th Century Portrait Prints

Materials

Paper

Original "Bombay" (American President Line) small format vintage travel poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: BOMBAY (American President Lines) Small format without text along the bottom. This is the smaller format for the poster. Archival linen-backed in very fine cond...
Category

1950s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Smiling Woman - Linocut by Mino Maccari - 1951
Located in Roma, IT
Woman is a Linocut Print realized by Mino Maccari in 1951. Very Good condition. No Signature. Mino Maccari (1898-1989) was an Italian writer, painter, engraver and journalist, win...
Category

1950s Modern Figurative Prints

Materials

Linocut

Shepard Fairey "A Cracked Icon" David Bowie Screenprint Street Urban Obey Giant
Located in Draper, UT
This screen print, “A Cracked Icon,” is a reference to one of my favorite musicians, David Bowie, and his song “Cracked Actor.” I’m fascinated by how we process fragmentation and mut...
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen

The Thinker
Located in New York, NY
The Thinker 2023 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches edition of 20 Skasi’s work arises from the belief that we inhabit the final romantic era before humanity's inevitable expansio...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Acrylic

Paper Beads for Tanzania, print for the environment, (Hand Signed by Vik Muniz)
Located in New York, NY
Vik Muniz Paper Beads for Tanzania (Hand Signed by Vik Muniz), 2016 Color offset Lithograph (Hand signed) Boldly signed in black marker by Vik Muniz on the front. 36 × 24 inches Unfr...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

Sammy Davis Jr Legendary Actor Singer Dancer African American 20th Century Litho
Located in New York, NY
Sammy Davis Jr Legendary Actor Singer Dancer African American 20th Century Litho Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) "Sammy Davis" Hand-Signed, Limited-Edition Lithograph, A.P. XV/XV Sight s...
Category

1990s Performance Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

"Chuck Close Study for 3D painting" 47x38" one of a kind archival pigment print
Located in Southampton, NY
This art is a one of a kind print on canvas with archival ink, it is completely flat but has the characteristics of Ceravolo's 3 dimensional look. It was the study for a large canvas of Chuck Close that was comprised of actual three dimensional elements. This unique one of a kind print has the depth that a Ceravolo canvas in known for while being completely flat. It is framed under plexiglass and measures 47x38" When Ceravolo met Chuck Close for the first time in 2008 he told Chuck that Chuck had indirectly feed his (Ceravolo's) family for the past 25 years because he (Ceravolo) started to paint large scale portraits after seeing Chucks portrait of Phillip Glass...
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Archival Pigment, Canvas

Sir. John Powell, Knight: Early 18th C. Engraved Portrait After William Sherwin
Located in Alamo, CA
This is an early 18th century portrait of Sir John Powell entitled "The Honorable Sr. John Powell, Knight. one of the Justices of her Majesties' Court of Common Pleas. Ano. D 1711". It was engraved and published by John King in London in 1711, after an earlier work by William Sherwin. The engraving depicts a bust length portrait of Powell wearing an elaborate fir-trimmed robe and collar. The portrait is encompassed in an ornate oval frame, sitting on a pedestal with an impressive coat-of-arms below. This engraved portrait is printed on laid, chain-linked watermarked cream-colored paper The sheet measures 15.25" high and 11.38" wide. It is adhered to an archival thick card at the upper corners, There is a 1/8" tear at the lower edge of the sheet, but the print is otherwise in very good condition. This engraving is held by museums and institutions, including the British Museum and the Harvard University Art Museum. Sir John Powell (1632-1696) was an English lawyer and judge who served as a justice of the King's Bench from 1683 until his death. He was born in Glamorganshire, Wales, and studied at Jesus College, Oxford, before being called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1656. Powell was known for his staunch support of the monarchy and the Church of England, and he played a prominent role in the trial of the Whig leader Lord William Russell in 1683, which resulted in Russell's execution for his alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate King Charles II. Powell was also involved in the trials of several other prominent Whig politicians, including Algernon Sidney and Titus Oates. In addition to his work as a judge, Powell was also a member of Parliament for various constituencies throughout his career, and he served as Solicitor General and Attorney General for Wales under King James II. However, he opposed James's efforts to promote Catholicism and supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which led to James's overthrow and the installation of William and Mary as joint monarchs. Powell was known for his intellectual rigor and his legal expertise, and he authored several influential legal treatises during his lifetime. He was widely respected by his peers and by the legal community as a whole, and his legacy as a jurist and judge continues to be celebrated today. William Sherwin (1645-1709) was an English engraver who worked during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and is known for his high-quality engravings of various subjects, including portraits, landscapes, and architectural views. Sherwin was trained as an engraver and worked as an apprentice to the renowned engraver Robert White. After completing his training, he went on to establish his own studio in London, where he produced a significant body of work over the course of his career. One of Sherwin's most famous works is his engraving of the portrait of John Locke...
Category

Early 18th Century Old Masters Portrait Prints

Materials

Engraving

INFRATERRESTRIALS ADORED BY DALI AT THE AGE OF SIX ...
Located in Aventura, FL
Engraving with lithographic color on paper. Hand signed and numbered in pencil. From the series La Conquete du Cosmos (Conquest of Cosmos). Frame approx size 45 x 35 inches. Sheet ...
Category

1970s Surrealist Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Engraving, Lithograph

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION Signed Lithograph, Children Jewish Holocaust
Located in Union City, NJ
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION is a fine art limited edition commemorative poster by the American artist/sculptor Chaim Gross. FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION was printed using four col...
Category

1980s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Lincoln and His Family, Philadalphia 1866
Located in Paonia, CO
Lincoln and His Family, Philadelphia 1866 is a mezzotint engraving from the painting by Samual B. Waugh and engraved by prestigious engraver William Sartain. This family portrait...
Category

Mid-19th Century Other Art Style Portrait Prints

Materials

Engraving

Hand Colored 19th c. Vanity Fair Caricature of an Opera Singer, "Polish Tenor"
Located in Alamo, CA
A hand colored Vanity Fair caricature of a 19th century opera singer, M Jean de Reszke, entitled 'Polish Tenor'. The print was created by the most famou...
Category

1890s Victorian Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

CHARLES CUNDALL, R. A.
Located in Portland, ME
Dodd, Francis. CHARLES CUNDALL, R. A.. Drypoint, 1926. Schwabe, 171. Signed in pencil. 18 x 11 3/4 inches, on a sheet of cream colored wove paper 20 1/2 x 14 5/8 inches. In excellent...
Category

1920s Portrait Prints

Materials

Drypoint

The Ballerina - Lithograph by Adolphe Willette - Late 19th century
Located in Roma, IT
The Ballerina is an original lithograph realized by Adolphe Willette (1857-1926) in the late 19th century. Good condition. Adolphe-Léon Willette (Châlons-sur-Marne, 1857 - Parigi, ...
Category

Late 19th Century Art Nouveau Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Sclaclaviol (W)
Located in Columbia, MO
Leonor Fini was born in Argentina in 1907 but travelled and lived in Europe with her mother from a young age. By 1931, she was in Paris, in the full swing of the Surrealist movement....
Category

20th Century Surrealist Portrait Prints

Materials

Paper, Ink, Etching

Nine of Coins
Located in Saint Louis, MO
Kehinde Wiley Nine of Coins, 2010 Archival inkjet print Framed Dimensions: 20.19 x 16.25 x 1 inches (51.27 x 41.27 x 2.54 cm) Edition AP 2/3, apart from the edition of 7
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Archival Ink, Inkjet

White Shirt Portfolio
Located in Calabasas, CA
Artist: Alex Katz Title: White Shirt Portfolio Year: 2021 Medium: Archival pigment ink on Innova Etching Cotton Rag 315 gsm fine art paper Sheets: 26 × 15 in (66× 38.1 cm) Edition: ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Archival Pigment

Magic of an opera. Limited edition print Surreal Established Polish artist
Located in Warsaw, PL
Giclee limited edition print by worldwidely established Polish artist Rafal Olbinski. Figurative surrealistic print presentic an intricate scene on a lake with swans, pegasuses, ball...
Category

2010s Surrealist Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Color

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire Artist : Henri MATISSE 13 x 10 inches Edition: 151/330 References : Duthuit-Matisse Catalogue raisonné 31 MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. PAINTING: BEGINNINGS Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted. Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes. In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life. MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after. Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go. Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted. Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up. Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel. FAUVISM Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity . Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion. When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style. Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.” From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality. Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne. FAME The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907. In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market. In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde. In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio. PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings. In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained. ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students. Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists. Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable." Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many. Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia. In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909. Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said. During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." MOROCCO Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well. Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic. In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women. Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays. Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics. Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors. Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture. The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years. AFTER PARIS Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem. In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life. Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends. Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children. Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938. Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple. The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation).'' After her dismissal, Delectorskaya shot herself in the chest with a pistol, remarkably with only a slight effect. Soon after the artist and his wife were legally separated Delectorskaya was back. She arrived with a bouquet of white daisies and blue cornflowers from her Aunt’s garden on July 15th, St Henry’s Day. Their working collaboration was to last right up to Matisse’s death in 1954. Her will throughout was indomitable; she typed, kept records and meticulous accounts and paid the household bills. She also organized Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with an iron grip as well as being his studio assistant and muse. And when called upon, even scoured the countryside on her bike for provisions during the war. Matisse claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence which, in the light of what Lydia accomplished is anything, if not an understatement. In the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.” Life with Matisse must have been taxing but it had been Amélie’s chosen vocation, through years of their studio-centered homes. Her central role in the artist's life was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a sizable house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909. However, in this period Matisse was increasingly absent. In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti. Matisse found that Tahiti was "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature. In September of 1940 he employed a temporary stand-in for his regular night nurse...
Category

1930s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Linocut

GLOWING HANDS Signed Lithograph, Spiritual Inspiration, Yellow Light, Blue Sky
Located in Union City, NJ
GLOWING HANDS is a hand drawn original lithograph printed using hand lithography techniques on archival Arches printmaking paper 100% acid free. GLOWING HANDS is a highly detailed sp...
Category

1970s Surrealist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Carlo Pellegrini, Vanity Fair artist portrait chromolithograph 1889
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
'Ape' Vanity Fair portrait of Carlo Pellegrini (1839-1889), nicknamed 'Ape', who was an artist who served from 1869 to 1889 as a caricaturist for Va...
Category

Late 19th Century Victorian Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

The Little Prince and the Fox
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This limited edition color lithograph, titled The Little Prince and His Fox, is a beautiful reproduction from the beloved book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This print...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

2008 Antoine de Saint Exupery 'Le Serpent'
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This limited edition color lithograph, titled The Serpent, beautifully recreates the iconic watercolors from the beloved book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Each print ...
Category

Early 2000s Modern Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Rainbow Oscar I (Limited Edition Print)
Located in LOS ANGELES, CA
**ANNUAL SUPER SALE UNTIL APRIL 15TH ONLY** *This Price Won't Be Repeated Again This Year - Take Advantage Of It* Celebrating the Academy with this Limited Oscar Art...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Giclée

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