Henri Manguin

A French artist, one of the most powerful colorists of avant-garde painting.

Born into a bourgeois family. Soon his father died, and his mother brought up Henri and his sister alone.

Henri Manguin was a member of the group of the Fauves, headed by Henri Matisse and was a close friend of pointillist Paul Signac. He participated in many exhibitions of contemporary art, including the famous Autumn salon in 1905, where Fauves first announced themselves with the help of bright colors and expressive emotions of their paintings. The artist was engaged in teaching, as the head of the painting department at the Ranson Academy. Once in the city of Saint-Tropez, Manguin fell in love with the southern nature forever, its lush colors and sunny atmosphere, he even left Paris to settle there.

Key Ideas:

– Henri Manguin is known for his beautiful Mediterranean landscapes and the images of nude females, which are distinguished by their legerity and ease.

– The artist loved to convey happy life, scenes full of harmony and joy. His models are relaxed and languid, they are located in a cozy interior or bask in the summer sun on the French Riviera. The artist’s landscapes are distinguished by elegant lines and a pleasant combination of rich saturated colors.

– Among other Fauvists, Manguin was distinguished by more harmonious colors and a less extreme approach to the depiction of objects. Bright pictures of turquoise Mediterranean waters and lush green vegetation fully correspond to the spirit of Fauvism, but they do not have the schematic of Friesz or Derain’s sharp contrast.

– Manguin’s canvases are balanced both compositionally and in terms of color ratios. The artist does not refuse from the perspective in his paintings, as many of his art colleagues did; his works always have a clear separation of the foreground and background and a sense of air space.

– Manguin was far from any theory; he was a born colorist and expressed his temperament with the help of intense colors in his paintings. The painter always kept intimacy with nature, understanding and expressing it as a part of oneself, as a source of natural pleasure and joy.

– Pierre Bonnard, the famous artist from the “Nabi” group, said about Manguin, “He perceives the landscape in all its immediacy, he feels it alive and finds a charm, a melody and a song of love in it.”