Henri Matisse. "La Piscine I" (The Swimming Pool). A lithographic representation of part of a large frieze created by Matisse. It has four folds as originally published.
THE SWIMMING POOL
One morning in the summer of 1952, Matisse told his studio assistant and secretary Lydia Delectorskaya that “he wanted to see divers,” so they set out to a favorite pool in Cannes. Suffering under the “blazing sun,” they returned home, where Matisse declared, “I will make myself my own pool.” He asked Delectorskaya to ring the walls of his dining room at the Hôtel Régina in Nice with a band of white paper, positioned just above the level of his head, breaking only at the windows and door at opposite ends of the room. The room itself was lined with tan burlap, a popular wall covering of the time. Matisse then cut his own divers, swimmers, and sea creatures out of paper painted in an ultramarine blue. The blue forms were pinned on the white paper, which helped define the aquatic ballet of bodies, splashing water, and light.
The result was Matisse’s first and only self-contained, site-specific cut-out. With its reduction of forms, its dynamic deployment of positives and negatives, and its lateral expansion across the walls, The Swimming Pool was the culmination of Matisse’s work in cut paper up until that point. Matisse saw in paper’s pliability a perfect representation of the fluidity of water, making The Swimming Pool a perfect melding of subject and means.
Beginning in 1938 a company called Verve began publishing a hard cover art book (mostly by subscription) each featuring different artists. The colour lithographs were printed by Mourlot of Paris and the black and white images were printed by Draeger Freres of Paris. The Matisse prints were included in the book titled ‘The Last Works of Matisse 1950-1954’. All of the colour images were executed by the artist with papers colored in gouache, cut with scissors and pasted into a collage; a medium that Matisse was very comfortable with. Matisse composed the cover specially for this volume. The lithographs were printed in 1954 under his direction. The whole work constitutes number 35/36 of the Verve series. The printing was completed in 1958 when the book was released to the public.
Henri Matisse was born 1869 in an industrial area of Northern France and almost accidentally stumbled into a career in art. Initially working as a legal clerk, he drew for pleasure in his spare time but he began to paint when he was recovering from an illness, and his career as a serious artist began.He moved to Paris shortly after where he was trained in classical painting but became aware of the art of Cezanne and Van Gogh who became influential figures in the development of his own artistic style.By the mid-1890s he was showing his works in large exhibitions and by the turn of the century, his style had become more progressive. A visit to St Tropez and later Coulloure, was the inspiration for him to infuse his works with light and bright colours. His work was more an abstracted realism, his human forms recognisable but altered.. A critic nicknamed Matisse a “Fauve” or “wildbeast”, because of the way he portrayed the human form, and the name Fauvism became the term used to describe the works of Matisse and some of his contemporaries.In Matisse, it is characterised by the emphasis on the emotional power of sinuous lines, strong brushwork and bright colours, and he captures a mood rather than merely trying to depict reality.With his now defined style his success grew and he travelled extensively for inspiration. Following a permanent move to Nice, he created some of his most famous works, the Blue Nude pictures. Health issues resulted in surgery in 1941 and he was often bedridden. But this did not stop him from creating art. He devised means to paint or draw such as attaching pencils or brushes to long poles so that he could reach the canvas and his late works were as experimental and vibrant as his early works.His 1947 book,Jazz, showed a new approach in the use of paper cut-outs stuck to brightly coloured paper to create his art, a technique he used until his death in 1954.Spanning a 60 year career, his revolutionary use of brilliant colour and exaggeration of form to convey emotion makes him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
