He worked on it at intervals over eight years, and it passed through a variety of transformations. Matisse regarded this picture as one of the most important in his career, and it is certainly one of his most puzzling. Some of his work reflects the mood and personality of his models, but more often he used them merely as vehicles for his own feelings, reducing them to ciphers in his monumental designs. At times he fragmented the figure harshly, at other times he treated it almost as a curvilinear, decorative element. Its importance for his Fauvist work reflects his feeling that the subject had been neglected in Impressionism, and it continued to be important to him. The human figure was central to Matisse's work both in sculpture and painting.Matisse once declared that he wanted his art to be one "of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter," and this aspiration was an important influence on some, such as Clement Greenberg, who looked to art to provide shelter from the disorientation of the modern world.Having seen several exhibitions of Asian art, and having traveled to North Africa, he incorporated some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese prints into his own style. Matisse was heavily influenced by art from other cultures.However, although he is popularly regarded as a painter devoted to pleasure and contentment, his use of color and pattern is often deliberately disorientating and unsettling. His art was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art.These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color. Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in his Fauve paintings.
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