Henri Matisse Timeline

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Americans in Paris—Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein, and Michael's wife Sarah—were important collectors and supporters of Matisse's paintings.

Matisse's first solo exhibition was held at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1904, without much success.

Matisse's fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez.

In 1905, Matisse travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure, producing some of the most vivid works of the emerging Fauve movement.

Matisse and a group of artists now known as 'Fauves' exhibited together in a room at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. A critic's comment, printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, passed into popular usage and gave the movement its name.

Image source: Fauvism

Matisse travelled to Algeria in 1906, studying African art and Primitivism, influences that deepened his expressive use of form and colour.

Around April 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years his junior. The two artists are commonly regarded as those who best helped define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century.

In 1907, Guillaume Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, wrote: 'We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable.' Yet his work also encountered vehement criticism, making it difficult for him to provide for his family.

Matisse created one of his major works La Danse specially for Sergei Shchukin as part of a two-painting commission, the other being Music (1910). An earlier version of La Danse (1909) is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Image source: Dance (Matisse)

After viewing a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, Matisse spent two months in Spain studying Moorish art. The effect on his art was a new boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour, as in L'Atelier Rouge (1911).

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), acquired in 1912 by the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Image source: Still Life with Geraniums

Matisse visited Morocco in 1912 and again in 1913, spending seven months there and producing about 24 paintings and numerous drawings. While painting in Tangier he made several changes to his work, including his use of black as a colour.

Matisse's painting Nu bleu (1907) was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913, illustrating the controversy provoked by his radical approach to the figure.

In 1917, Matisse relocated to Cimiez on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. The more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.

After 1930, a new vigor and bolder simplification appeared in Matisse's work. This move toward simplification and a foreshadowing of the cut-out technique is evident in his painting Large Reclining Nude (1935).

Matisse's son Pierre Matisse (1900–1989) opened a modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, active from 1931 until 1989, represented and exhibited many European artists in New York, often for the first time.

Albert Barnes convinced Matisse to produce a large mural for the Barnes Foundation, The Dance II, completed in 1932; the Foundation owns several dozen other Matisse paintings.

Image source: Barnes Foundation

Matisse's wife Amélie, who suspected that he was having an affair with her young Russian émigrée companion Lydia Delectorskaya, ended their 41-year marriage in July 1939, dividing their possessions equally between them.

Matisse was visiting Paris when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940, but managed to make his way back to Nice. In September 1940, he wrote Pierre: 'It seemed to me as if I would be deserting.'

In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with abdominal cancer and underwent surgery that left him reliant on a wheelchair and often bed bound. This confinement led him toward the paper cut-out as his primary medium.

In 1942, Matisse's son Pierre held an exhibition in New York titled 'Artists in Exile', which was to become legendary. That same year, Matisse met Monique Bourgeois, a nurse who sometimes modelled for him.

Matisse moved to the hilltop of Vence, France in 1943, where he produced his first major cut-out project for his artist's book titled Jazz. His new understanding of this medium unfolds with the 1946 introduction for Jazz.

Image source: Jazz (Henri Matisse)

Matisse's student Rudolf Levy was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, a tragic loss among the wartime events surrounding the artist.

The number of independently conceived cut-outs steadily increased following Jazz, eventually leading to the creation of mural-size works such as Oceania the Sky and Oceania the Sea of 1946. That year, Monique Bourgeois became a Dominican nun.

In 1948, Matisse began preparing designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, painted in honor of Sister Jacques-Marie (formerly Monique Bourgeois), allowing him to expand the cut-out technique within a truly decorative context. He finished his last painting in 1951.

Image source: Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

In May 1954, Matisse's cut-out The Sheaf was exhibited at the Salon de Mai and met with success.

In 1952, Matisse established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France.

Image source: Matisse Museum (Le Cateau-Cambrésis)

The Matisse Museum in Nice opened in 1963 and is located in the Villa des Arènes, a seventeenth-century villa in the neighbourhood of Cimiez.

Image source: Musée Matisse (Nice)

From 5 October 2001 to 20 January 2002, the Fundación Juan March in Madrid exhibited Matisse, presenting a broad survey of his work.

Image source: Fundación Juan March

In 2004, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Le Musée Matisse organized 'Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His Textiles', displaying Matisse's textile collection alongside related works. The exhibit was shown at the Musée Matisse (23 October 2004–25 January 2005), the Royal Academy of Arts (5 March–30 May 2005) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (23 June–25 September 2005).

Matisse's The Plum Blossoms (1948) was purchased on 8 September 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art by Henry Kravis and museum president Marie-Josée Drouin. It had not been seen by the public since 1970.

Image source: Prunus mume

In 2012, 'Matisse: In Search of True Painting' was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibit was shown at the Centre Pompidou (7 March–18 June 2012), the Statens Museum for Kunst (14 July–28 October 2012), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (4 December 2012–17 March 2013).

Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

'Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs' was exhibited at London's Tate Modern from April to September 2014, featuring 130 works encompassing his practice from 1937 to 1954. The show then moved to New York's Museum of Modern Art, on display from 12 October 2014 until 10 February 2015.

Image source: Tate Modern

From 30 October 2015 through 18 January 2016, the Morgan Library & Museum held an exhibit of Matisse's book illustration projects titled 'Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts'.

Image source: Morgan Library & Museum

In 2018, Matisse's work was exhibited alongside that of Joan Miró, Le Corbusier, Raymond Hains and Éric Sandillon at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Riga, Latvia.

Image source: Latvian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design

From 1 May to 10 September 2022, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited Matisse's painting The Red Studio, along with paintings and drawings closely related to the work.

Image source: The Red Studio

In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston co-organized 'Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism', examining their work together and the birth of Fauvism. The Met exhibited the show 13 October 2023 to 21 January 2024; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showed it 25 February–27 May 2024.

From 4 April to 24 August 2025, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris exhibited 'Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father's Eyes', focusing on the relationship between Matisse and his daughter Marguerite.

Image source: Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

From 7 March–1 June 2026, the Art Institute of Chicago will exhibit 'Matisse's Jazz: Rhythms in Color', featuring his vibrant compositions combined with his original text collected in the unbound book Jazz.

Image source: Art Institute of Chicago

The Baltimore Museum of Art will exhibit three shows of Matisse's work in 2026: 'Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again' (11 March–6 September), pairing Matisse's works with painter Louis Fratino; 'Matisse and Martinique: Portraits and Poetry' (18 March–25 October), focusing on lithographs for poems by John-Antoine Nau; and 'Matisse in Vence: The Stations of the Cross' (29 March–28 June), exhibiting drawings for the Stations of the Cross mural created for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

Image source: Baltimore Museum of Art

From 24 March–26 July 2026, the Grand Palais, Paris was expected to exhibit 'Matisse 1941 – 1954', featuring over 300 paintings, drawings, books and cut-out gouaches retracing the period between 1941 and 1954, accompanied by the catalog Color Unbound: Henri Matisse 1941-1954 by Claudine Grammont.

Image source: Grand Palais

From 9 April–22 May 2026, Acquavella Galleries will exhibit 'Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony', featuring more than 50 paintings, sculptures and works on paper on loan from public and private collections, with examples spanning five decades of his work.

Image source: Acquavella Galleries

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. According to David Rockefeller, his final work was the design for a stained-glass window installed at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, whose installation was completed in 1956.

A crater on the planet Mercury was named Matisse in his honor in 1976.

Image source: Matisse (crater)