Henri Matisse, La Porte de la Casbah

 

"There is indeed something special about this place. Burroughs described the native corridor of Tangier as a maze of sunless twisting streets filled with blind alleys. Its smell was particularly notable to him, including a mix of hashish, seared meat, and sewage."

- Anthony Bourdain

where Keith Richards eats

Matisse and Hemingway also enjoyed Trattoria Da Romano.

aphorism

"I use memories, but I will not allow them to use me."
- unattributed 

living room

Henri Mattise, The Piano Lesson, 1916

degenerate

André Derain's [1880-1954] Henri Matisse, 1905

Along with many other modern artists, Henri Matisse was labeled degenerate by Germany's head of state and failed artist Adolph Hitler.

Impressionist at heart

La Fenêtre, 1925

Or was he a forward looking modernist?

Pierre Bonnard [1867-1947], "reveled in the wizadries of light and the surprises his own sensations held in store fore him."

The painter's art gives a human value to objects and reproduces things as they appear to a human eye. And this vision is full of changes, full of movement.

"Bonnard divided his time between the Mediterranean world of Renoir and the regions beloved of Monet, the Ile-de-France, the Seine valley, the Channel beaches."

From the Economist:

There was nothing of the romantic artist in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn’t even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.

Henri Matisse, his near contemporary, was a close friend; “Work Table”, finished in 1937, shows his influence. Like Matisse, Bonnard has been dismissively labelled a decorative artist, a painter of happiness. This exhibition should put an end to that. The 1946 “Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror” is almost terrifyingly bleak. “Bouquet of Mimosas”, painted the year before, offers no hope-filled, sweetly perfumed vision of early spring. Instead, it conjures up a deadly poison that seems to seep out of the flowers.

being inspired by the muse

Harmony in Red [La desserte], Spring 1908

"Here is the painter Henri Matisse, describing what happened when, after having to take a leave of absence from his occupation in the legal profession, he took up painting as a hobby: 'I had become possessed by painting and could not abstain. When I started to paint, felt transported to a kind of paradise ... Something drove me, I do not know what, a force, something alien to my normal life as a man.' Mozart reportedly wrote down symphonies as quickly as if he were listening to them and transcribing. Nor is the idea of the muse especially Western. The Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan said that his equations were whispered to him by the Goddess Namagiri."

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, p.237

An earlier reference to Matisse here.

"Canada's Painter"

Jack Bush [1909-1977], Split Circle #3, 1961

Henri Matisse's work when he was in his eighties in the 1950s and wheelchair-bound inspired Bush.

An earlier reference to Matisse here.

south of france

Self Portrait when Matisse was forty-nine in 1918.

"Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.”

“I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.”

- Henri Matisse [1869-1954]