Henri Matisse
Born Dec. 31, 1869 and dies Nov. 3, 1954) Henri Matisse was a French Artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. Although he was initially labeled as a Fauve(wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. He studied under Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau and experimented with Pointillism, which he found rigidly confining. Later, building on the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, he and Andre Derain developed Fauvism, a much freer and more expressive style of painting which was in fact the forerunner of Expressionism.
