Along with Braque, who made a living coloring stray cats in orange, Henri Matisse was one of the few members of the School of Paris who had a steady job: he worked at the Louvre making exact copies of the paintings of the great masters. But it is revealing that, just the day after the “June 7, 1909 incident”, he decided to improve the Mona Lisa by painting her a mustache, which is why he was fired. Matisse suffered from a severe inferiority complex due to the fact that he was unable to walk backwards without crashing into something, thus greatly limiting his social life. So when presented with the opportunity to invent Fauvism, he jumped at the chance. Fauvism is characterized by the violent distortion of reality. Matisse himself won Mr. Ugly contest several years in a row by distorting his face to the limit. Matisse’s grimaces are believed to have inspired Braque and Picasso to invent Cubism. Fauvism and Cubism ended up pairing, generating a multitude of ‘isms’ among which surrealism stands out with its revolutionary technique of painting dreams ‘in fresco’, that is, applying a layer of fresh plaster upon the subconscious to serve as a support to the painted dream.
MATISSE DISTORTING HIS OWN FACE:
SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE 