Henry Matisse's Madam Matisse: The Green Line

Madam Matisse: The Green Line

Henry Matisse, one of the most influential members of the Fauve movement, was responsible for much of the attention brought to it and its respective members. One of his works, Madame Matisse: The Green Line, more or less serves as an excellent example of what he was trying to accomplish in art: the use of color to express and convey emotions.

The composition of the work consists of a portrait of Madame Matisse in the foreground and a background divided into several distinct areas of color. The division in the background is apparent in the juxtaposition of the mauve, orange and blue green, with the foreground divided primarily by the green strip itself, which runs down the middle of Madam Matisse’s face and separates the painting along a vertical axis. The background and foreground, however, are rendered almost completely flat, so that they seem to become part of one another, and Madame Matisse seems to become somewhat of a portrait within a portrait.

The space in the portrait is more or less two dimensional, with only a slight hint of depth illustrated by a dark area of shading above Madame Matisse’s left shoulder. The perspective is entirely frontal with her torso angled to the left and her head slightly to the right.

Color, along with the subject of Madame Matisse, is the focus and most important element of the work. Matisse has used color here to illustrate a sense of the emotions he feels for his wife. These colors are primarily bright, striking colors such as orange, red, yellow, mauve and bright green accompanied by the use of a cooler, calmer blue-green and black. The combination of these colors is non-naturalistic and provides a contrast that is readily apparent t...

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...began his professional career as a lawyer and did not discover painting and art until he bought a set of watercolors at some point before 1892. After he did discover his love of art he began to study in Paris in 1892 and spent much time in the south of France, which vastly affected the style of his work.

In conclusion, the painting Madam Matisse: The Green Stripe is an embodiment of everything that Matisse himself and the Fauve movement stood for: the lyrical use of color to create “an art of balance, purity, and serenity.” He was able to use the initial ideas created in the Fauve movement and advance them beyond what any other artist in the period had done previously or after. In fact, one might say that Matisse was the artist who ensured the lasting impression of Fauvism on artistic expression and that it would not be what it is today without his influence.