Volume 39, Number 18 · November 5, 1992
Passions of Matisse
By Jack Flam
Henri Matisse: A Retrospective 1992–January 12, 1993
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York September 24,
Henri Matisse: A Retrospective
catalog of the exhibition by John Elderfield
Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 480 pp., $37.50 (paper)
Collecting Matisse
by Albert Kostenevich, by Natalia Semenova
Flammarion/Abbeville Press, 192 pp., $60.00
In 1950 Bernard Berenson visited Henri Matisse at his apartment in the Hotel Regina overlooking Nice. Berenson, who had been one of Matisse's early supporters, was irritated to find that the man whom he chose to remember as a starving young Fauve now displayed a seigneurial self-absorption even grander than his own. Polite but remote, Matisse seemed to take it for granted that the noted connoisseur's visit was an act of homage. Five years after this encounter, Berenson took his revenge by ending a short essay about the recently deceased artist as follows: 'My conclusion about Matisse is that in the neck-and-neck race with Picasso for the highest place in the art of the last fifty years he ended by coming in second.'[1]
Review, 5426 words
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