The Joy of Life
Henri Matisse
HENRI MATISSE, c.1905. OIL ON CANVAS.
One of the foundational pillars of early modernism, Matisse’s monumental canvas ‘The Joy of Life’ contains within it the past, the present, and the future. The past, in its lush pastoral setting and compositional similarities to an Italian Renaissance print by the great Agostino Carracci and an earlier Flemish painting by Paolo Fiammingo. The present, in its spatial distortions, flattening of dimensions and cadmium colours that rejected the conservative malaise of the day, causing outrage and offence when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. Together with Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’, it created a new language of European painting that came to define the art history of the 20th Century. And the future, for within the painting is the origins of another of Matisse’s masterpieces. In the centre, furthest from the viewer, is a group of dancers who, three years later, would take centre stage in Matisse’s most well-known work ‘The Dance’. Matisse hid one seminal work inside another, anticipating the direction that he and the European artistic canon would move.