Apples
Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
1916
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 116.5 × 89.5 cm (45 7/8 × 35 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Florene May Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
When the 45-year-old Henri Matisse was rejected from military service at the outbreak of World War I, a friend encouraged him to contribute to the war effort the best way he could: by continuing to paint well. This led to a productive period of compositional and material experimentation that Matisse hoped would sustain the tradition of French painting in the face of a cultural and national threat.
Matisse painted this still-life composition twice—in the abstract work seen here and also in a more traditionally representational version. A hidden light source bathes the scene in warm tones, which are offset by a swath of green. Luminous black consumes the background, reflecting Matisse’s challenge to himself to use black as a “color of light, not darkness.”
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
