Henri Matisse - Master of color - Fauvism style
"Biography - 1869-1954
Henri Matisse was born as the son of a grain merchant in the Picardy region of northern France. He studied law and worked as a law clerk. When Henri Matisse was 21 years old he became seriously ill. During the phase of convalescence Matisse started painting and discovered his love for art, which should become his life-long passion.
Two years later, in 1892, he gave up his career as a lawyer. He attended art classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and dabbled in different styles. He then was influenced by the impressionist and post-impressionist painters Pisarro, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Paul Signac and by the paintings of W. Turner.
Around the year 1905 he finally found his own style characterized by daring, bright colors executed in a broad brush stroke. "
There are some his painting:

Two Figures Reclining in a Landscape

Flowers in a Pitcher

Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life)

Matisse’s painting is the world of colors, But there are some kind of abstraction in the ways of using colors. Colors in Matisse’s are not like the real colors . It is right, however, he uses them in his own purposes. If we just have a quick glad, there are not differences to impressionism art painting. They are odd in colors. There looks like have some similar in some sense of feeling. However, there are some quite differences. That is the meaning of color's presentation. There are some kinds of abstraction in colors. Maybe each viewer can has his own feeling to answer the question:" What is meaning for those odd colors?". When thinking about this, now I understand more about what Don had taught me in class. Yeah! May be it is the ways to find out the difference between the modern art and the art before that age. Before, Art is kinds of photograph the real sense. From now on, ABSTRACTION becomes one of the most important part to both modern and post modern art. I don’t know why I feel his style and Picasso’s style have some similarity ways. The answer is they are both using ABSTRACTION in their painting. I would like to leave out to you the question: “What is the difference in the abstraction between his styles and Picasso?" after I find the answer for my own. Hope you like my question.

the related links:
www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/matisse/