Matisse, Henri

Henri Matisse (Taschen Basic Art Series)

An indispensable work of reference about this lodestar of modern art...

The extraordinary significance of the painter and sculptor Henri Matisse in the history of modern art, but also his influence, was no less decisive than that of his main rival, PabloPicasso. In fact, Matisse's stylistic liberation actually goes one step further in the pursuit of his own personal goal — the perfect synthesis of line and color — by which he sought revolutionary approaches to the great tradition of French painting by drawing upon its classical aspects. For those who wish to know more about this lodestar of modern art and follow the adventurous path of his creative career, this publication is surely the most comprehensive and informative source available. Lavishly illustrated, its authoritative commentaries trace the artist's search for balance, purityand serenity, from the chromatic brilliance of his Fauve period, through his travels, the Orient, geometric synthesis (it was he who introduced Picasso to African art by givinghim his first mask), and the odalisques to the final triumph when, at the age of eighty, he invented his gouache cut-outs that culminated in his illustrations for Jazz and allowed him to achieve his goal of sculpting in paint just as a sculptor works in stone. Matisse is widely acknowledged as an artist whose canvases are extremely difficult to reproduce in print. With this in mind, each work presented here has been painstakingly compared with the respective original, in close collaboration with the artist's grandson, Claude Duthuit. The bard of color deserves no less.

Matisse on Art, Revised edition (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art)

The major writings of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), with the exception of the letters, are collected here along with transcriptions of important interviews and broadcasts given at various stages of Matisse's career. Jack Flam provides a biography, a general introduction that addresses the development of Matisse's aesthetic values and theories, and a critical introduction for each text.

Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.

Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.

If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.


From the Hardcover edition.

Matisse And Picasso: The Story Of Their Rivalry And Friendship (Icon Editions)

Matisse: From Color to Architecture

Few artists have explored genres and techniques with such curiosity and pleasure as Henri Matisse, whose fascination with the relationship between interior and exterior forms occupied him throughout his career. In the early 1950s, he chose to dedicate his last years to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence and the nursery school in his hometown of Le Cateau-Cambrésis, both in the South of France. These sites represent a culmination of all Matisse's earlier visual and spatial explorations.

This book sheds new light on the development of Matisse's oeuvre, which spans some 60 years. Lavishly illustrated with almost 400 images, this deluxe volume includes beautiful reproductions of the artist's most famous paintings paired with lesser-known documents and photographs culled from the archives of his estate. The authors also gathered first-hand accounts related by numerous participants in the Vence and Le Cateau projects. The result is a fascinating, almost day-to-day look at Matisse's process as he created these works, and an intimate portrait of both the artist and the man. AUTHOR BIO: The late René Percheron was head of the museum of national antique art in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, and a lecturer on the history of art and photography. Christian Brouder is a researcher at CNRS, the national organization for scientific research in Paris.

Henri Matisse: Erotic Sketches (Prestel's Erotic Sketchbook Series)

This exquisite volume opens the doors of Matisse's atelier to reveal the artist's most intimate work.

For Henri Matisse, drawing was an exercise as personal as it was essential to his art. Reproduced on elegant stock these black and white and gently colored sketches allow the viewer to appreciate the quality of Matisse's lines, their confidence and ease, as well as the intense relationship between artist and model. Matisse's joie de vivre, his love of beauty, and his fascination with the human body are everywhere in evidence in this lovely book that is a pleasure to hold.

Henri Matisse: Figure Color Space

No other subject inspired Henri Matisse with such passion throughout his career as the female figure in interior settings. This is the most comprehensive publication to cover the topic of women in the work of the great regenerator of European painting, and in so doing, it covers the full spectrum of Matisse's creative evolution, from the small, somber, early pictures to the masterly compositions of his Fauvist phase, the intimate pictorial inventions of the Nice period, and finally the luminous paper cutouts of his late work. Many of the interiors show women reading, sleeping or daydreaming, passive figures enveloped in Oriental fabrics, costumed as odalisques or reclining on chaise longues. Additional motifs include the artist and his model, the artist's studio, the portrait, the still-life, and the view from a window. Figure Color Space offers an in-depth survey of this important subject in Matisse's work, through which he developed and continually explored his rich and imaginative repertoire of forms and colors. Along with paintings from all periods, it includes sculptures, drawings, cutouts and prints, as well as historical studio photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Brassae, Hal ne Adant and others. A richly illustrated biography completes this exquisite presentation.

Henri Matisse,: Drawing With Scissors, Masterpieces from the Late Years

Henri Matisse: Drawings with Scissors Masterpieces from the Late Years Olivier Berggruen and Max Hollein

Now in an attractively priced flexi-cover edition, this lavishly illustrated volume presents all aspects of Matisse's cutouts.

Henri Matisse's paintings and drawings are some of the most revered in the art world and his cutouts are widely believed to represent the zenith of his artistic career. When Jazz, Matisse's revolutionary handmade book of paper cutouts, was published in the early 1940s, it was considered a dramatic departure for the artist. Eventually he came to consider the cutout as his primary artistic medium. This collection of superb reproductions and critical essays offers a chance to appreciate the full spectrum of Matisse's work, from the early models for Jazz to the large-scale works that dominated the artist's final creative period, and offers fascinating new discoveries about the connections between the cutouts and his earliest works.

Max Hollein is Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.

Olivier Berggruen is an art historian, who lives in New York.

Matisse: Painter as Sculptor

The Unknown Matisse

"Matisse was born in 1869 in northern France and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border, on the drab, cold, wet beet fields of French Flanders. The same area, culturally and geographically speaking, had produced Vincent van Gogh sixteen years before." Thus begins the first full biography of an artist who, more than any other, is associated with Mediterranean heat, brilliant color and light, and languid, luxurious interiors. As author Hilary Spurling points out, an open window is one of Matisse's frequent motifs. Given the climate of his youth, that image speaks more of escape than of the sea air of the French Riviera.

If all biographers wrote with Spurling's warmth, empathy, and intelligence, no one would likely want to read any other kind of book. The Unknown Matisse is thoroughly researched, with pages devoted to minutiae that Spurling imparts with wit and style, making every nuance of Matisse's early development fascinating. She tells too the story of Matisse's family life (Mme. Matisse risked her respectable reputation by adopting Henri's first, illegitimate daughter), his brilliant ideas about art, and the years it took for his paintings to find their rightful audience. It was her intention finally to give as much weight to Matisse's life as has been given to his work, but in the process of examining the man she sheds new light on the art as well. --Peggy Moorman

Henri Matisse is one of the masters of twentieth-century art and a household word to millions of people who find joy and meaning in his light-filled, colorful images--yet, despite all the books devoted to his work, the man himself has remained a mystery. Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.

Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite.

But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.

From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.

Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now.

It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.

Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.

In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.


From the Hardcover edition.