Pastoral Landscapes In Henri Matisse's The Joy Of Life

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From 1905 to 1906 Henri Matisse completed the Le Bonheur de Vivre or The Joy of Life, one of the most famous works of fauvism, that demonstrated Matisse's want to change the common pastoral landscape found since antiquity by strong contour lines and fauvist colors. Matisse living through impressionism saw the need and desire for art to be pushed past the boundaries of the pre conceived notions of what was aesthetically pleasing, which had barely been change since the founding of art. In The Joy of Life, Matisse paints a pastoral landscape, a quiet and peaceful scene of the country with a new twist. This piece had bright gay colors and showed a change of human form through line.
In this painting, Matisse shows leisurely outdoor activities, a scene that has been replicated for more than a hundred years. Here he challenges the common composition, which was used by masters of art such as Giovanni Bellini and Titian. In this overwhelmingly large piece he combines all the previous pastoral landscapes from art history into one cohesive piece (Arnason). The piece has an overall sensual and erotic effect brought on by the voluptuous figures, and the almost pulsating background of trees, done in bright fauvist colors. The trees frame the painting and the small groups of people within. The woman on the far left with her arms up and hands cross behind her neck is a common pose which he thought to have adopted from Cezanne, an impressionist painter who very much inspired Matisse (Picasso and Matisse) The viewer's eye then travels around the painting to a couple embracing and then people dancing. The latter grouping became the inspiration for Matisse's The Dance paintings. Within the trees on the far right is a Shepard playing a flute to his ...

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...ternal reality and given the new engagement of revealing the artist's experience of reality by the colors pure chromatic intensity. (Arnason) Matisse in this painting uses color to show differences among nature and people unlike the paintings prior to him where differences were shown throw chiaroscuro and minute details. Although fauvism was one of the shortest periods in all of art history you can still see an echo of its high key colors for many periods after its ending.
For hundreds of years prior to the creation of The Joy of Life landscapes with nudes doings leisurely activities were being painting; however, none were done in the style that Matisse painted his figures. (Kramer) Matisse painted this scene in heavy contour lines as thick as ones thumb. He reduces the figures and the landscape to its simplest form by removing chiaroscuro and fine details.

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