Community Unit School District 200



Lesson Focus: A collage is the art of making pictures by sticking cloth, pieces of paper, photographs, and other objects onto a surface.

Art Focus: Henri Matisse The Snail and Beasts of the Sea

Materials from Art Smart Closet:

• White paper

• Construction paper and construction paper scraps

Materials in Classroom:

• Scissors

• Glue sticks

Materials from Home:

• Extra scraps of construction paper if needed

Class Discussion (15 minutes)

Slide #1

• Today we are going to learn about an artist named Henri Matisse. Matisse was born in 1869 in France and he first attended a drawing class when he was studying to become a lawyer in Paris. He was 21 years old when he began to paint. He was recovering from an operation and soon gave up his career in law.

• Matisse was famous for his use of vibrant color. Matisse reinvented his art career at the age of 73 when he became ill and bedridden. He found a new way to make pictures using paper cut-outs. Because he could no longer paint he began cutting out brightly colored paper. He said he was “drawing with scissors.” Matisse cut out the brightly colored shapes and arranged them into interesting designs. When he was confined to a wheelchair, he continued to create by showing his housekeeper where to place and paste the cut-outs to form his designs. He was very hard-working and created many artworks up until his death at the age of 85.

Slide #2 Let’s take a look at a famous collage by Matisse.

• What do you see when you look at his collage? If you had to come up with a title for this piece, what would you name it? It is actually called The Snail.

• Do you think the title, The Snail, suits the painting? Would you call it something else? At first glance this painting appears totally abstract and although we see no definition of “The Snail,” the shapes in the center of the painting form a spiral which represents the shell of a snail.

• Why do you think Matisse chose the colors that he did? Matisse used complimentary colors such as blue/orange and red/green to create contrast. The black used enhances the vibrancy and intensity of the other colors. He often left white spaces in his paintings to enhance the intensity of the colors he used.

• Is there any sort of pattern that he used to arrange the pieces? Not a repeated pattern but perhaps in the use of color.

• What adjectives could you use to describe this painting? Colorful, energetic, vivid, simple, etc.

Slide #3 Now we are going to look at another collage by Matisse called Beasts of the Sea.

• Do you see “beasts of the sea” in this collage? (subjective answers)

• In what ways does this remind you of the bottom of the sea? (shapes resembling seaweed or plant life or creatures)

• Where do you see creative shapes of plants? How are they different than real plants? (subjective answers)

• If you didn’t know the title, would you know what this was showing?

• Do you see any shapes that he cut apart and then put together? It appears as the designs could fit inside of each other.

• Are there any patterns? There is repetition of color, shape and design.

Slide #4

• In what way are these collages similar? There is a repetition of color and shape. The shapes are geometric but yet original. The colors are vivid and cheery. The ideas are abstract.

• How do they make you feel - happy or sad? What about the pictures makes you feel that way? The bright colors are meant to be happy or cheery and pull your eyes around the whole composition creating visual interest.

Slide #5 - #7

• Optional Slides: Here are several more Matisse paintings to show if time permits. The following are quotes by Henri Matisse:

“To find joy in the sky, the trees, the flowers…

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”

“Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.”

Matisse had strong feelings about only one thing, the act of painting. This to him was an experience so profoundly joyous that he wanted to transmit it to the beholder in all its freshness and immediacy.

The purpose of his pictures, he always asserted, was to give pleasure.

Art Activity (15 minutes) Matisse Collage

Explanation for Presenter:

Using construction paper, scissors, and glue sticks the students are going to make collages inspired by Matisse. Give each student a full sheet of white construction paper, and then have a variety of scraps or sheets of construction paper for them to cut into shapes. Any good scraps you have can be saved in the Art Smart Closet for another class.

Explanation to students:

Having studied The Snail by Matisse and formed your opinions, it is now time to use your knowledge and understanding to begin your own work.

• Use a variety of colored paper, scissors and a glue stick to create your own collage inspired by Matisse’s work.

• Begin by cutting a variety of different shapes out of the colored paper. Keep the shapes angular and use contrast in size and color. As you cut, consider a theme, or title for your work. An animal, insect or bird, perhaps?

• As you begin to select your shapes of paper (you won’t use them all), consider what we have observed in Matisse’s work:

* The white background

* The bright border

* The vibrant color relationships

* The black contrast

• Take your time on this task. You are thinking about composition and making decisions about color and pattern. You may want to adapt, or cut out specific shapes to enhance your collage.

• When you are satisfied with your composition, carefully glue the shapes into place and there you have it…your very own Matisse inspired collage!

Artist/Artwork Background Information: (Reference for Presenter)

HENRY MATISSE

Matisse, Henri (b. Dec. 31, 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy, France. d. Nov. 3, 1954, Nice) Matisse is often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. The leader of the Fauvist movement around 1900, Matisse pursued the expressiveness of color throughout his career. His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.

Matisse, Master of Color

The art of our century has been dominated by two men: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They are artists of classical greatness, and their visionary forays into new art have changed our understanding of the world. Matisse was the elder of the two, but he was a slower and more methodical man by temperament and it was Picasso who initially made the greater splash. Matisse, like Raphael, was a born leader and taught and encouraged other painters, while Picasso, like Michelangelo, inhibited them with his power: he was a natural czar.

Matisse's artistic career was long and varied, covering many different styles of painting from Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and his celebration of bright colors reached its peak in 1917 when he began to spend time on the French Riviera at Nice and Venice. Here he concentrated on reflecting the sensual color of his surroundings and completed some of his most exciting paintings. In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed as having duodenal cancer and was permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Venice.

Matisse's art has an astonishing force and lives by innate right in a paradise world into which Matisse draws all his viewers. He gravitated to the beautiful and produced some of the most powerful beauty ever painted. He was a man of anxious temperament, just as Picasso, who saw him as his only rival, was a man of peasant fears, well concealed. Both artists, in their own fashion, dealt with these disturbances through the sublimation of painting: Picasso destroyed his fear of women in his art, while Matisse coaxed his nervous tension into serenity. He spoke of his art as being like "a good armchair"-- a ludicrously inept comparison for such a brilliant man-- but his art was a respite, a reprieve, a comfort to him.

Matisse initially became famous as the King of the Fauves, an inappropriate name for this gentlemanly intellectual: there was no wildness in him, though there was much passion. He is an awesomely controlled artist, and his spirit, his mind, always had the upper hand over the "beast" of Fauvism.

The experimental years

Matisse's Fauvist years were superseded by an experimental period, as he abandoned three-dimensional effects in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shape, and strong pattern. The intellectual splendor of this dazzlingly beautiful art appealed to the Russian mentality, and many great Matisses are now in Russia. One is The Conversation (1909; 177 x 217 cm (5 ft 9 3/4 in x 7 ft 1 1/2 in)) in which husband and wife converse. But the conversation is voiceless. They are implacably opposed: the man-- a self portrait-- is dominating and upright, while the woman leans back sulkily in her chair. She is imprisoned in it, shut in on all sides. The chair's arms hem her in, and yet the chair itself is almost indistinguishable from the background: she is stuck in the prison of her whole context. The open window offers escape; she is held back by an iron railing. He towers above, as dynamic as she is passive, every line of his striped pajamas undeviatingly upright, a wholly directed man. His neck thickens to keep his outline straight and firm, an arrow of concentrated energy. The picture cannot contain him and his head continues beyond it and into the outside world. He is greater that it all, and the sole "word" of this inimical conversation is written in the scroll of the rail: Non. Does he say no to his intensity of life? They deny each other forever.

Supreme decoration

But denial is essentially antipathetic to Matisse. He was a great celebrator, and to many his most characteristic pictures are the wonderful odalisques he painted in Nice (he loved Nice for the sheer quality of its warm, southern light). Though such a theme was not appreciated at the time, it is impossible for us to look at Odalisque with Raised Arms (1923; 65 x 50 cm (25 1/2 x 19 3/4)) and feel that Matisse is exploiting her. The woman herself is unaware of him, lost in private reverie as she surrenders to the sunlight, and she, together with the splendid opulence of her chair, he diaphanous skirt, and the intricately decorated panels on either side, all unite in a majestic whole that celebrates the glory of creation.

It is not her abstract beauty that attracts Matisse, but her concrete reality. He reveals a world of supreme decoration: for example, the small black patches of underarm hair on the odalisque are almost a witty inverted comma mark round the globes of her breasts and the rose pink center of each nipple.

Sculpting in paper

Picasso and Matisse were active to the end of their lives, but while Picasso was preoccupied with his ageing sexuality, Matisse moved into a period of selfless invention. In this last phase, too weak to stand at an easel, he created his paper cuts, carving in colored paper, scissoring out shapes, and collaging them into sometimes vast pictures. These works, daringly brilliant, are the nearest he ever came to abstraction. Beasts of the Sea (1950; 295.5 x 154 cm (9 ft 8 in x 5 ft 1/2 in)) gives a wonderful underwater feeling of fish, sea cucumbers, sea horses, and water-weeds, the liquid liberty of the submarine world where most of us can never go. Its geometric rightness and chromatic radiance sum up the two great gifts of this artist and it is easy to see why he is the greatest colorist of the 20th century. He understood how elements worked together, how colors and shapes could come to life most startlingly when set in context: everything of Matisse's works together superbly.

Information taken from the WebMuseum



The Snail

Orientation: This work is very large, nearly three meters square. At first sight it appears to be an abstract arrangement of vibrant colored, geometric blocks on a white background. The blocks of color are arranged in a loose spiral suggesting the shape of a snail’s shell. Instead of being painted directly onto canvas, the blocks of color are made from pieces of paper that have been painted in a water based paint called gouache. The brightly painted paper has been torn and cut into uneven shapes and stuck onto a white paper background. The whole composition has then been stuck onto canvas.

The Snail was made in 1953, a year before Matisse died. It is a remarkably energetic work considering he was eighty four and suffering from poor health. Confined to either his bed or his wheelchair, Matisse was forced to develop an entirely new technique. He would cut and tear directly into colored sheets of paper without making any preliminary drawings. Matisse described this as like ‘drawing straight into color’. Rather than having to build up the color on the canvas as he had throughout his career, Matisse was now taking color as his starting point. He would carve into the colored paper with his scissors to reveal shapes, liberated by the simplicity and directness of his new technique.



Beasts of the Sea

Beasts of the Sea is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1950. It is a paper collage on canvas. It is currently in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. During the early to mid-1940s Matisse was in poor health. Eventually by 1950 he stopped painting in favor of his paper cutouts. Beasts of the Sea, is an example of Matisse's final body of works known as the cutouts. In the last fifteen years of his life Matisse produced paper works by "cutting into color," as he said. These shapes, cut freehand and later glued onto a background, seem at once calm and dynamic.

Gouache (rhymes with "squash"), the name of which derives from the Italian guazzo, "water paint, splash" or body color (the term preferred by art historians) is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. Gouache differs from watercolor in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk is also present. Like all water media, it is diluted with water. (Gum Arabic is also present as a binding agent just like in water color.) This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fauvism was a brief art movement made up of several young Parisian painters at the beginning of the 20th century.Primarily a transitional movement, Fauvism came about as the art world shifted from the Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin to the Cubism of Braque and Picasso.

Led by Henri Matisse, this group of painters often used vivid colors—without much mixing or blending—to create flat shapes in their paintings while still being representational.

Their paintings weren’t meant to closely mimic nature or re-create the impression of light as the Impressionists had, but to use whatever colors necessary to express an emotion or feeling.

The name, Les Fauves was actually first used as a derogatory remark about their work by French art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Les Fauves actually means “wild beasts”—it referred to Matisse and the others’ choice of colors, indicating that their work was savage and primitive.

Mountains at Collioure by André Derain certainly is a little wild, and reminds me quite a bit of Van Gogh’s paintings, too.

In the painting you can see those vivid colors and repetitive brush strokes which which gave the Fauves’ paintings a very rough, unfinished look compared to the other artwork at that time.

The most famous painting from the Fauvism movement, however, is probably Matisse’s Green Stripe.

In this portrait of his wife, Matisse used solid colors throughout, and depended entirely upon the intensity of his colors to create depth and shape.

Thick black lines and rough brush strokes completed the image.

Although it isn’t necessarily a flattering portrait, Matisse did exactly what he intended to, creating a stylistic and primitive painting that deliberately celebrated the use of color.

For the Fauves, it really was all about the color.

Taken from

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