Art World Mourns Henri Matisse, Dead at Home in Nice at Age of 84
PARIS, Nov. 4--The world of art today mourned Henri Matisse, one of France's greatest painters, who died in his apartment in Nice yesterday afternoon of a heart attack. He was 84 years old.
Death came swiftly to the aged artist, who had been a semi-invalid since undergoing a serious operation in 1940. At his bedside were his daughter, Mme. Marguerite Duthite; his physician, a nurse and his secretary. Mme. Duthite had arrived in Nice from Paris a few days ago to visit her father.
Henri Matisse, leader of young rebel artists who brought the modern art movement into being in Paris a half century ago, was a master of color, a supreme draftsman who imbued a relatively small range of subject matter with constant variety.
The artist's long career, begun with years of academic schooling, became set in its brilliant revolutionary course in 1905, when, in company with Rouault, Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and a few others, Matisse set Paris on its ears in the Autumn Salon. The painters were excoriated as fauves-- wild beasts--and their pictures, flaming defiant canvases, were condemned as impossible.
On June 25, 1951, thousands of tourists and natives crowded the small village of Vence in south France to see the Bishop bless what Matisse had called his “masterpiece"--a chapel on which he had started work four years before.
Ailing and bedridden through much of this period, Matisse serenely progressed with his decorations for the chapel, drawing his designs with a long charcoal-tipped stick on the walls of his bedroom, later copying them on tiles and transferring them to stained glass. This was his last work, he announced: “My bags are packed."
Matisse held no common ground with those who considered modern art as a new mode. He once said that every art is a logical reflection of the time in which it is produced--an orderly and rational development of what had gone before.
Jean Cassou, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, recalled that Matisse, bedridden much of the time after his operation, continued to work from his room.
“Henri Matisse is one of the last representatives of French genius," he said. “If the title of master suits any artist it certainly suited him. All men deserving of this name, all men who think, can consider themselves as his disciples. His thinking has illuminated our era."
Andre Berthoin, Minister of National Education, in a statement on the death of the artist, said that the “world will mourn" with France.
“His was the most French of palettes. Intelligence, reason and the alliance of a sense of finesse and of simplifying geometry gave to all he painted the rare virtue of being truly French," M. Berthoin said.
