1 comments about Henri Matisse (Artists in Their Time).

1. This was a great book for fast research I wanted to do, and had no time for more complicated books. It can be read by both children and adults.
   There are many photos, paintings, chronological charts and quotations by the great artist. It's very well organized and cohesive.
   I recommend this book for everyone.

2 comments about Matisse Portraits.

1. Matisse Portraits by John Klein (associate professor of art history at the University of Missouri-Columbia) is a comprehensive survey and analysis of the artwork of Henri Matisse, who especially devoted himself to human figure and portraits of sitters. Klein goes a step further to provide an in-depth, scholarly commentary upon individual works and the aggregate body of Matisse's portraits. Filled with black-and-white and color illustrations of Matisse's artwork, Matisse Portraits is more than artbook - it is an art appreciation book, filled with discourse and thoughtful analysis. Highly recommended for academic and art school collections, as well as true art aficionados with an interest in the work of Henri Matisse.



2. Matisse Portraits is a serious discussion with extensive text of the artist's work in that genre, which in this instance includes self-portraiture and family groups. Following the Introduction the book is divided into seven chapters. Firstly the writer explores "the problems posed by portraiture of other individuals to an artist who was resolute that the goal of his work was self-expression". The next three chapters concern themselves with the move from private to public self-expression: Chapter 2 deals with Matisse's early portraits; Chapter 3 with portraits of is family and how he manages the treatment of those with whom he has close emotional ties; Chapter 4 with portraiture beyond the immediate family but not yet public, those who were sympathetic to his efforts.
   
   Chapters 4 and 5 consider the public aspect of his portraiture and self-portraiture; firstly his patronage and portrait commission, then the artist's self-portraiture at a time when he achieved a level of fame. The final Chapter the writer considers "the phenomenon of the portrait-like depiction of a hired model in Matisse's work in answer to the problems that portraiture's social dimension posed".
   
   The book closes with a section under the heading "Conclusion - Signing Off: The End of the Portrait". There are extensive Notes; a Select Bibliography; and an Index.
   
   This is a scholarly yet very readable study; the writer discusses Matisse's work at length, and the individual paintings in detail, drawing comparisons, occasionally with the work of other artists.
   
   It is illustrated throughout with around 200 illustrations, the vast majority in full colour; those in black and white are mostly monotone drawings. The images vary in size and include the quite small, but there are many good sized pictures of a quarter, half or full-page, with a few full-page bleed images, invariable of a detail from a painting. The images run with the text and most usefully appear alongside the relevant passages.
   
   This is an impressive well laid-out book printed on quality paper; a most handsome volume.

No comments about Matisse: His Art and His Public.

5 comments about Chasing Matisse: A Year in France Living My Dream.

1. The author, a writer and artist, is fascinated by the work of Matisse. He and his wife, also a writer, sell their house, leave their desk jobs and go off to France to follow in the footsteps of Matisse. The author chronicles their travels to the places that inspired Matisse - Paris, Collioure in the Pyrenees, Corsica, Belle-Ile off the coast of Britany and the South of France.
   
   In these places the author learns not just to look but also to see. The facts of Matisse's life and his development as an artist are interwoven with the travel adventures of the author and his wife as they live their dream of starting over in a foreign country. A look into the soul of an artist and what we can learn from him if we seek to live the creative life, this book is vastly superior to the shallowness of "C'est La Vie" by Susie Gershman and her vacuous tale of leaving the US to live in Paris.
   
   The only thing missing from "Chasing Matisse" is a map so that the reader can see the locations of the various places that are visited. It's also helpful to have on hand a copy of "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective", Museum of Modern Art 1992, while you read so that you can see the paintings that the author mentions extensively in the book.



2. I'm an American living in France for over 5 years now and I am an amateur painter. And I really like Matisse. So I was really excited when I found this book. I really like the author's humor, he turns what could be boring descriptions of their trip into very funny tales. The book is a mix of a peek into their lives, their adventure in France, the characters they meet, and oh yes, Matisse. I learned a lot in this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the author's sketches and his website.
   
   However, all that said, the book left me wanting more. I got the impression that at the end the author simply got tired of writing or ran out of material. For example, their summer in france only gets a few pages. What was the impact of his search for Matisse? How did it impact his art? Did he just stop chasing Matisse 3 months before he came home? I also would have liked to see more of his sketches as they really helped to imagine the places they went, the hotel rooms, etc.
   
   Overall it was a great book. If you are interested in France, Matisse, or painting, I highly recommend this book!



3. Here I am trapped in a dull grey/brown Northeast winter when I picked up this book and went on a great trip! As an artist I really loved Mr. Morgan's passion for Matisse, for art in general and I loved his sketches! As a traveler who never gets to travel enough I loved the journey he took me on through France. As a matter of fact I'm so inspired that I'm heading to France this June and I'm going to take another long look at Matisse! So if you love art...this is a terrific book, if you love travel...this is a terrific book. If you love both then you're a terrific person who will really enjoy this book!



4. This is a book I'm sure I'll reread many times. The author combines humor with depth, and the sense of adventure is inspiring. Right now I'm smiling, just remembering how pleasurable it was to read this book. author (unrelated to me) really did his research, too; I'm now thinking about Arnheim and Elins with renewed interest -- and I'll pursue some of the other books about Matisse as well.



5. Chasing Matisse: A Year in France Living My Dream
   
   What a load of pretentious nonsense! The author combines samples of his own work (which are child-like), a poor travelogue of France and a brief, dry biography of a great painter (with few original insights) in an offering that had me bored from page one. He asks for sympathy for his financially 'risk-taking' venture whilst telling us of his efforts to sell his house (at $79,000 under value) and fly his children over to France to celebrate Christmas whilst regailing us with descriptions of the expensive meals and swish hotels he stays in. We don't need the constant admiring prose for Henri's work - it speaks for itself.

No comments about Sticker Art Shapes: Henri Matisse (Sticker Art Shapes).

1 comments about Henri Matisse: Jazz (Pegasus Library).

1. First, the good news. The book itself is beautifully printed. Pages are heavy stock - I've seen flimsier business cards. Color is rich, and only one page had any registration problem that I could see. This is more than just a monograph about the artist, it reproduces a book by the artist (and I'm grateful for the English translation). I have a passion for primary sources - Matisse isn't among my favorite artists, but I'll listen when an undeniable master speaks.

   Unfortunately, two major features of the book interfere with my full enjoyment of it. First, the original Jazz interleaved images with text in Matisse's own hand. A little of the hand-written text has been reproduced, but certainly not all of it. The original relationship of text and image has been lost. Second, and related, is that the translation appears in the back of the book. It's only a minor nuisance to flip back and forth between the book's real content and back matter. I had real problems, though, with the fact that the back matter gives the whole of Matisse's text, but the main content does not. The translated part gives no indication of what it provides that the reproduction doesn't, so it was a "Where's Waldo" exercise, trying to resynchronize my reading with viewing of the images. Perhaps economic decisions about printing forced the omissions. I can still wish that different tradeoffs had been used in the choice, or that the book's organization could have compensated better for the losses.

   A final point, and a relatively minor one, is that Matisse provided a visual index or table of contents, showing a thumbnail sketch of each work in the book. I was fascinated by Matisse's own view of what mattered in each composition. The way it's reproduced looks a bit like a ransom note, however. Each annotation has been cut out into its own little box and laid out according to the book designer's idea of proper organization. Perhaps there is good reason for this; maybe the thumbnails would have been illegibly small if the page were reproduced to scale. Still, I would have liked to see the original page's organization, even if the reproduction also showed the sketches at readable size.

   Despite the book's flaws, it seems to be an adequate presentation of a coherent body of compositions. Warts and all, I looking forward to enjoying the book over and over.

5 comments about Matisse Stories, The.

1. These three short stories about how women see our world --- the colors they see, the sounds they hear, the thoughts they think-- are truly remarkable for their philosophic depth and their word craftsmanship. In some ways, reading these stories (stories attuned to the everyday details of our lives); stories that describe the ringing of the phone, the belt buckle of the hairdresser; the color of the still-alive lobster in his "cage" with as much, if not more, attention as they do the "big themes" of life, death, and marriage. They are haunting, they are short and crisp and precise. The language flows gracefully and forcefully (though you do not notice the force until later; until you have closed the book).

   And they stay with you.




2. Henry Matisse's paintings were solid, colorful, and strangely calming to just sit back and look at. A.S. Byatt's "Matisse Stories" have a similar effect (though the effect of Matisse and his artwork only really is established in the third story). A mixed bag of three stories, all focusing on women and Matisse's paintings.

   "Medusa's Ankles" introduces us to an aging woman who is drawn into a hair salon by the "rosy nude," a Matisse painting. Her semi-friendship with the hairdresser deteriorates when he leaves his middle-aged wife for a pretty young girlfriend, forcing the woman to face her own aging and life."Art Work" introduces a very artistic couple and their eccentric housekeeper -- who has a few secrets of her own. And "Chinese Lobster" takes on the sobering topic of sexual harrassment, when a young art student files a suit against a visiting professor who is lecturing on Matisse. But it turns out that the student may be the problem...

   Matisse is sometimes the center of these stories, but elsewhere you can barely find the poor guy. His paintings -- and the destruction of them -- is the center of "Chinese Lobster." But his art is only a minor part of the other two stories. Byatt's flair for description doesn't fail her now -- she paints vivid, lush descriptions of restaurants, hair salons and past memories. At the same time, she adds small "everyday" touches like live lobsters, little dishes, paints.

   While both "Medusa's Ankles" and "Chinese Lobster" are solid, self-contained little stories, "Art Work" is something of a mess. It seems to focus on too many subplots (Debbie's feelings about giving up her work, her husband's artwork) before settling on one. And her descriptions of art galleries and so forth seem rather off, as if she has never tussled with them and isn't sure how it happens.

   While "Art Work" bogs down the overall effect somewhat, "Matisse Stories" is a charming little (very little) collection for fans of the French artist. Pretty and sometimes thought-provoking.




3. In symphonic music, they call the aural equivalent of these stories "tone poems". I'm not sure if there is exactly the right description in literature for what Byatt aimed for here, but I think that analogy works. Byatt hoped, I believe, to cement her stories to Matisse in such a way that her words and these tales would represent in image the vivid colors and expression of Matisse's paintings. None of these three stories really gripped me or lingers well in my memory. I think it's fair to say Byatt was hoping to cast her female characters' views on life as a surrogate for how art itself might be viewed as a reflection of human experience.



4. Let me begin my review by stating that I am not a big fan of the "description-for-description's sake" school of writing, with supposed "beautiful" prose standing in for an actual story. Fantastic imagery and specific details can be a great addition to a book that is already succeeding with engaging characters and a forward-moving story, but on their own I just find it to be tedious. That said, Byatt's collection of three longish short-stories has within it moments and characters I found myself drawn to, and writing that I enjoyed the rhythms and construction of, but overall this was a bit of a task for me to read.
   
   The first offering of Matisse-inspired stories, "Medusa's Ankles," was my favorite, probably because it involved conflict that was both internal and external, with an un-sympathetic protagonist who I found compassion and understanding for by its end. The third story, "The Chinese Lobster," makes more use of dialogue than mood or overly poetic language, but it ultimately stumbles in its aims by not giving the reader a situation or characters we can care a whit about.
   
   By the time I got to the second piece, "Art Work" (yes, I read them out of order), my patience with the book was waning and I wasn't rewarded in my decision to save the longest story (50-plus pages) for last. Essentially an art history course wrapped in fiction, with palettes and colours and lack of colour and shadows explored in numbing detail, the story was a misfire for me at the start. Long passages of scenic and location-specific descriptions confuse and disorient, rather than ground and illuminate this reader before any characters are even witnessed, much less introduced. The characters then reveal themselves to be paper-thin, appearing only to allow Ms. Byatt to work her muscles of laundry-list style description and repetitive sentence-structuring. Overall, the whole experience of reading this felt like too much work for too little reward.



5. A.S. Byatt, the Booker Prize winning author of "Possession," attempts an impressionistic portrait of the tension between aesthetics and emotion, with allusions to Who-Doesn't-Like-Matisse, and literary nods to Woolf and other masters of the ouvre. It's all so very pretty and stylized, and filled with such small ideas posing as BIG THOUGHTS. Imagine, Art as life! Life as art! Both and neither as everyday things that we just-took-for-granted!
   
   In such an important book, little considerations like plausibility and nuance of character may be dispensed with. Consider the following summaries of Byatt's three easy pieces: Uptight scholar throws tantrum and wrecks a once Rubenesque styling salon gone Post-Modern; Lower classish maid/nanny controls her apparent controllers--an uptight editor and her uptight, once promising painter spouse, and then upstages the latter in a didn't-see-that-coming showing of her sculptures made from her employers' throwaways(!), and two uptighters: He, an impossibly drawn caricature of cruel academia; she--the only believable voice here--a Dean mollify his pathological ravings (and posible gropings) of a ambiguously portrayed but clearly troubled graduate student.
   
   Byatt doesn't let our minds wander and think and fill in the blank spaces: She pretty much covers the entire canvas with starkly drawn, shallow pictures of these tightly-wound characters. Like the small-scale achievements of her protagonists, Byatt writes very fine miniatures--bursts of adjectives as metaphor here, a keenly observed, "revealing" detail there, but the whole mess comes apart if you step back and try to make sense of it-the opposite result of Impressionist work. As others have noted, Byatt focuses more on language and feeling and all that psychology stuff, but if these are embedded within fable-like set pieces we're not about to believe the actors' suppressed and repressed emotions, let alone their facades. I'm not sure who the joke's on when Byatt basically paints a word picture of a vulva in the first story, in which she also places "cunning" followed by "linguist" in the same paragraph. Perhaps this is Dada-esque subversion or a Fauvist attempt to awaken our senses.
   
   The stories succeed only in a gigantic suspension bridge of disbelief. Rather than Impressionism, this strikes me as miniatures of superb writing set against a large trompe de l'oeil canvas, and, for the most part, the trompe is on us.

2 comments about Henri Matisse, 1869-1954: Master of Colour (Basic Art).

1. the problem with series that attempt to impose an accessible beginners' format on art and artists is that these things rarely conform to method. the Taschen introductions to great artists are all 96 pages long, dividing the artist's life into significant chronological chapters, following strict biography, and using key paintings to illustrate various points made. this is fine in practice, we've all got to start somewhere, and the series is noted for its refusal to talk down to the reader, its clarity of interpretation, and the bounteous range of miraculously mounted, full-colour reproductions, not just of paintings, but line drawings, lithographs, sketches, studies, woodcuts etc.

   The obvious difficulty is not that artists are transcendent and wayward figures who won't fit into a neat grid, but that some artists lived to be considerably older than others. the first book in this series I read was Anna Meseure's 'Auguste Macke', the study of a painter who died when he was only 27. Meseure was able to elaborate each development in Macke's work in detail, and to give a proper treatment of biographical background and its influence on the art, if only on the level of subject matter.

   Macke, however, remains a marginal figure. henri Matisse is one of the towering geniuses of 20th century culture. He lived, and painted masterpieces, until he was 85; his life spanned two cataclysmic World Wars, a riot of social and political changes, and almost every aesthetic revolution worth talking about in the last 150 years. given the same amount of space to discuss Matisse as Meseure had with a painter a third his age, Essers' study can't help being a cursory skim, with few revelatory anecdotes (we only learn in the chronology about Matisse's pilgrimmage to the aging Renoir; his theatre designs for Stravinsky; or the visit of Aragon to his sickbed during World War Two - such episodes are surely as important as some given prominence in the book), or, worse, few intimations of the blinding raptures that must have seized Matisse at each new artistic discovery and breakthrough. We learn very little about his relation to his cultural milieu, his tacit rivalry with Picasso, or his overall importance in the history of art; discussion of the work is apolitically formalist. Uncomfortable questions - the obsessiveness of his early year despite his family's poverty; his apoliticism during World War Two - are skimmed over.

   None of this really matters. Matisse's work travels surprisingly well in reproduction, especially the later works involving cut-outs, simplified forms and bold colours. the colours throughout are done full bright justice to, so dazzling in fact that reading this book for more than an hour gave me a headache. The rich mix of classics ('Woman with the Hat', 'La Dance', 'Jazz') with the revelatory, less well-known (including spare, geometric, near-abstract views of Notre Dame during World War One) allow us to write our own story of this shamanic artist, whose patrician, Freudian mien concealed the colours and curves of a blazing and boundless inner life.




2. One looks at the works of Matisse and wonders why there is no Noble Prize in Art. He would have been so deserving. The works printed in this book are dazzling in their colors, shapes, lines and proportions. His work will be viewed for many, many years as the masterpieces of a tremendously creative man.

No comments about Henri Matisse: Figure Color Space.

1 comments about Matisse Line Drawings and Prints: 50 Works (Dover Art Library).

1. Excellent collection of Matisse's works. The drawings are so simple but tell a lot of the subject. All the drawings lack light but the reader is still able to see the full form of the subject. The drawings are also presented very clearly for the art student to study.