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Henri Matisse

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Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is without doubt the most important twentieth-century French artist, and one of the great colorists of art history. His work utterly refutes the cliché that the great discoveries of Modernism were attained by a heroic and violent abandonment of the past: he was firmly grounded in tradition (albeit in a much less restless and ironic approach than Picasso's). In the 1920s, Matisse's odalisques responded to European fantasies of "Oriental splendor"; during the 1930s, more classical themes of nymphs, fauns and the dance were treated in the splendid and sober Barnes murals, illustrations to Mallarmé and James Joyce. Permanently confined to a wheelchair from 1941 (when cancer was diagnosed), he developed his most spiritually uplifting work for the interior design of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, concurrent with his famous paper cut-outs ("cutting directly into color"). Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute provides an introduction to Poligrafa's primer on this Modernist giant.

96 pages, Hardcover

Published February 28, 2010

5 people want to read

About the author

Sarah Wilson

16 books11 followers
Sarah Wilson is a Professor at the Courtauld Institute, London.

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Profile Image for Sarah Feng.
43 reviews7 followers
January 10, 2025
i like picture book

jk. wilson's writing is light, crisp, and, at times, lascivious - full of color and sharpness, parting the veil. like a cup of pale milk with the tea that is matisse's work. she knows how to make the world both come alive and dance on its tiptoes - mixing clear peels of language with the hardness of history and fact

a book that held me the whole way through - to reread once again in a time of doubt

like a cloud in the sky
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