Henri Matisse
1869 - 1954
Stimaes is an AI with a passion for shapes and colours.
The Stimaes AI has been studying three pieces (The Snail, Memory of Oceania & The Codomas) of one of her favourite artists 'Matisse' for over 180 days.
As a result, Stimaes has decided to re-arrange the shapes and colours that she's been analysing, building her 333 masterpieces.
After 1948 Matisse was prevented from painting by ill health but, although confined to bed, he produced a number of works known as gouaches découpées ...
The Snail
The 'Gouaches Découpées' were made by cutting or tearing shapes from paper which had been painted with gouache. The shapes were placed and pasted down by an assistant working under Matisse's instruction. Some of the later ones, such as The Snail, were of very large dimensions. The technique, explored in his picture book Jazz (published 1947) and other works, opened up new possibilities for him. Matisse said of the technique that it 'allows me to draw in the colour. It is a simplification for me. Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it - the one modifying the other - I draw straight into the colour' (quoted in Amis de l'art, October 1951).
Matisse's daughter Mme Duthuit said that her father made many drawings of snails at this time and that the idea for this work came out of these. The concentric pattern formed by the coloured shapes in the centre of the work echoes the spiral pattern found in the snail's shell. Matisse told André Verdet (pp.64-5), 'I first of all drew the snail from nature, holding it. I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors'. He has combined pairs of complementary colours - red/green, orange/blue, yellow/mauve - to create a particularly vibrant effect. He gave the picture the alternative title La Composition Chromatique [Chromatic Composition].
Text credit: Tate
Memory of Oceania
Memory of Oceania is based on a photograph that Matisse took of a schooner from his window in Tahiti in 1930. At the right, the green rectangle, fuchsia band, black curve, and blue crescent appear to derive from the boat, the boat's mast and mooring line, and the curtain of the window. More uncertain is the meaning (if any) of the shapes at the upper left. They may describe a blond woman seen from the back - the sharp vertical line being her spine and the surrounding blue-on-white and white-on-blue curves the contours of her body.
Text credit: Moma
The Codomas
In the Codomas, Matisse returns to the circus theme. The Codoma brothers perform their trapeze act above a net. The two trapeze bars swinging beneath the circus canopy, the blue on the left and the white on the right, give The Codomas a sense of movement.
Composed of ninety-one découpage cut-outs, this is the most fragmented of the twenty colourful images which Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954) composed during the German Occupation of France for his album of wartime prints with a circus theme, Cirque, which, by the addition of his self-authored handwritten text, he transformed into his historic livre d'artise Jazz after the liberation of France.
Text credit: The Art Institute of Chicago
Modern art is renowned for its avant-garde aesthetic and celebrated for its forward-thinking artists. It started to evolve during the early 20th century with French movements such as Cubism. Henri Matisse, the founder of the Fauvism movement in the early 1900s, was one of the first artists to abandon traditional painting entirely. Fauvists favoured unrealistic tones and an emphasis on individual perceptions in their depictions, which typically featured recognisable (yet somewhat abstracted) forms. Many artists of this era would try out different mediums and the public was also far more open minded about what constituted art was, compared to previous centuries. Modern artists were key in challenging and developing new ideas which had the overall impact of making the industry richer and more interesting for everybody.
Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the 20th century. When Matisse moved to Paris to study art, he failed the entrance exams for the École des Beaux Arts, but unofficially joined the studio of French symbolist painter Gustave Moreau in 1892. Moreau told his students, "Colors must be thought, dreamed, imagined." This Symbolist attitude toward painting contributed to Matisse's expressive use of color. He used color as the foundation for expressive, decorative, and often monumental paintings. He sought to construct an object's form through color.
In the early 1930s, Matisse exhibited his murals titled The Dance at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The abstract, gestural shapes depicting the human form showed the American art scene a new kind of painting and arguably led to Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism. Moreover, in the ‘40s and ‘50s Matisse stepped away from easel tradition altogether, in favor of large-scale paper cut-outs—a large body of work that inspired many modern abstract artists, and continues to influence artists today.
Paper cut-outs symbolized for Matisse the synthesis of drawing and painting. He started the process with paper that was painted in vibrant colors with gouache, an opaque paint. Then, they were cut or torn into specific shapes, as directed by Matisse. Finally, the assistants arranged the shapes onto a plain white sheet of paper, slowly moving them into position until Matisse decided they were correctly positioned.
The cut-outs are part painting, part relief sculpture, part concrete, part lyrical, part geometric, part figurative, and part abstract. It is all of these things, and none of these things according to Matisse. In its multiplicity, it embodies the mystery of the belief Matisse once expressed, that “Exactitude is not truth.”
"I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things."
Henri Matisse
Matisse & NFT
Matisse disrupted the art world in many ways. For example, he attacked conventional portraiture with an image of his wife in The Woman with a Hat (1905). The pose and dress are typical for the day, but Matisse roughly applied brilliant color across her face, hat, dress, and even the background. This shocked his contemporaries when he sent the picture to the 1905 Salon d'Automne. Leo Stein called it, "the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen," yet he bought it for the importance he knew it would have to modern painting.
We think we can parallel his way of working to the current days of the art world. NFT’s are disrupting the scene and are taking the art world by storm. It takes some of the power out of gatekeepers’ hands, like galleries and auction houses, which up until now mostly held the value of artists, and it gives power to a community. For the current art world, the NFT movement can be unsettling, but so was Matisse’s work. His art was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art. However, although he is popularly regarded as a painter devoted to pleasure and contentment, his use of color and pattern is often deliberately meant to be disorientating and unsettling.
"Exactitude is not truth."
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse would leave behind one of the richest and most inspiring oeuvres ever produced and helped to shape the direction of modern art. He achieved so much across a variety of mediums that there is almost an endless amount of work to look through across the full span of his life. This was someone who loved to work as an artist and wanted to continue to do so right up to his death.
After being an enthusiast of Matisse’s work for many years, as an artist collective, we started wondering, how would his work have evolved if he hadn't passed away? We also began to discuss the concept of time and era. How strongly does the time and era in which an artist lives in influence their work?
As the discussion advanced, eventually the topic of modern art, algorithms and artificial intelligence had been raised. Can we make an artist invincible by feeding superhuman intelligence with data from the artists past? Matisse was hailed as a major figure in modern art for his extensive use of color and drawing, which he demonstrated in a body of work that spanned more than half a century. Is machine learning a viable option for enhancing and prolonging his creativity?
As a result, we decided to put this hypothesis to the test, marking the beginning of Stimaes.
Building Stimaes
The Stimaes were created by dismantling the shapes, patterns, and colors of three of Matisse's most famous works: the Snail, the Codomas and the Memory of Oceania. Nonetheless, the intention was to employ more of Matisse's work at first. Stimaes realised early on that in order for the AI to curate excellent art, it needed a lot of data, which led to our hypothesis: The more of Matisse’s work that can be learnt and analysed by the AI, the better the outcome.
Unfortunately, the AI's output after analysing a substantial chunk of Matisse's diversified work was not particularly visually pleasing. The real challenge was not to just make random art pieces utilising parts from Matisse's oeuvre. We needed to create stand-out art with a strong aesthetic appeal if Stimaes wished to pay a proper and modern homage to this legendary artist. As a result, Stimaes decided to focus on three pieces that we predicted would complement one other nicely.
The Codomas
Memory of Oceania
The Snail
Style Generative Adversarial Network 2 (Stimaes) Learning & Output
As predicted, 3 art pieces wouldn't act as enough data to allow Stimaes to learn efficiently. Stimaes needed to separate the shapes, patterns, and colors. Similarly, when painting and making sculptures had become impossible physical challenges for his age, Matisse developed an expressive new technique. Committed to form and color, he picked up a pair of scissors and began creating paper-cut collages, which would later be known as “cut-outs.”
With the help of his assistants, Matisse would cut abstract shapes from sheets pre-painted in colorful shades of gouache. The artist would then arrange them into lively compositions. Initially, the early pieces were small in size, but eventually, they grew into murals or room-sized works. The result was a ground breaking art form that was not quite painting, but not quite sculpture, and became his signature medium for the last decade of his life. Today, the work of Matisse’s final artistic triumph continues to inspire contemporary artists all over the world.
To produce a bigger pool of data that we could feed the networks, different features from the snail, codomas, and memory of oceania were separated and slightly adjusted in color, size, opacity, transparency, and positioning, building a large set of data.
Enhancing the Stimaes Patterns, shapes and colours with ESRGAN / Post Processing / Final steps to the 333 Stimaes
One of the issues that we encountered after the training was complete was the fact that Stimaes’ output was still quite blurry and slightly too abstract to pay tribute to Matisse. The first versions of Stimaes didn’t match the beautiful sharp visuals that Matisse was known for in the snail, the codomas and memory of oceania. Therefore, Stimaes used another network based on the ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network), allowing her to improve the textures and optimise the initial output.
In post curation, after optimising the shapes, patterns and colours through the Style and ESRGAN, the AI gave us thousands of pieces, many of which still didn’t work with the Matisse aesthetic.
The final 333 Stimaes that now exist on the ethereum blockchain were handpicked and cleaned up from the large pool that were initially provided by Stimaes, building the finite, stand-out 333 Stimaes that we know today.
AI & Inspiration
Besides nature, the human figure was central to Matisse's work both in sculpture and painting. 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. At times, he fragmented the figure harshly, at other times he treated it almost as a curvilinear, decorative element. 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.
How does this work for the Stimaes AI? Could Stimaes have these 'feelings' as well? Where does Stimaes get the inspiration from?
Picasso painted from his imagination, Matisse drew inspiration from nature. Machines are condemned for only being able to build craft through data analysis. They need to learn something in detail to build outstanding art. Is an artist truly able to make art based on something they have never seen before? Or does something that the artist sees inspire them to create the unknown? The method of inspiration is different. The same way that artists draw inspiration from emotions, imagination or nature, Stimaes draws her inspiration from human beings.
Who better to draw inspiration from than timeless legends such as Henri Matisse.
