Read the text.

Wild Beast 

When French artist Henri Matisse exhibited his paintings in France in 1905, people were shocked—and horrified! The bold colours that filled his canvases jarred people’s senses. One of his paintings, A Woman in a Hat, showed a woman whose face and clothing were painted in unnatural greens, reds and purples. The painting’s irregular, loose brushstrokes made it seem unfinished. One critic who reviewed the show called Matisse and his fellow artists fauves, which means ‘wild beasts’ in French. The name stuck and led to the start of the modern art movement known as fauvism. 

 While his new art may have seemed ‘wild’, Matisse’s earlier life had been quite tame. He grew up in an ordinary French family and became a lawyer in Paris. He started taking art classes for fun, both before and after work. Then, when he became ill and had to go home to recover, his mother bought him a set of paints to pass the time. That’s when he decided to become an artist instead of a lawyer. He started studying art more seriously, and he quickly became skilled at painting in the traditional style of the time. 

But soon Matisse started experimenting with his painting. Many artists were starting to move away from the old, traditional ways of doing art. New styles were taking shape. Matisse wanted to put more emotion in his paintings. He didn’t want to just imitate real life. He started using bolder colours, rounder shapes and less detail. He wanted to paint the essence of his subjects, their simplest forms and the way they made him feel. The result was quite different from anything seen in the world of art before. 

Matisse is often called the ‘father of modern art’. His work influenced other artists to take risks and try new things. He and Pablo Picasso, another famous modern artist known for his ‘shocking’ art, developed a long-lasting friendship and rivalry. Though they were friends, the two men tried to outdo each other in exploring new approaches to art. They competed with each other and challenged each other to try new ideas. 

Matisse’s work continued to change throughout his life. In 1941, when he was seventy-two years old, he became ill and had to stay in bed. That’s when he began making art in yet another brand-new style. He called it ‘drawing with scissors’. He painted pieces of paper in bright colours and then cut shapes from them. He made collages by combining the shapes and gluing them onto large sheets of paper. In 1947, he published a popular book of these collages, called Jazz.

 Matisse worked as an artist for about six decades before he died in 1954. Besides paintings and collages, he also produced drawings, statues and stained glass. He never stopped creating in ways that broke the ‘rules of art’. Though the fauvism movement he’d started in the early 1900s only lasted a short time, Matisse himself remained the art world’s ‘wild beast’ all his life.