Volume 32, Number 1 · January 31, 1985
The Golden Age
By John Golding
Matisse
by Pierre Schneider, translated by Michael Taylor, by Bridget Strevens Romer
Rizzoli, 752 pp., $95.00
Virtually all of Matisse's important early patrons and collectors were foreigners: Americans, Russians, Scandinavians, Germans. It was not until 1922, when Matisse was in his fifties, that the French government purchased a work for the Musée du Luxembourg, choosing the somewhat conventional Odalisque with Red Trousers. But Matisse had still not had the critical attention he deserved. Apollinaire, who had done so much to keep Matisse's name before the public in the years before 1914, was dead. Breton, who was about to succeed Apollinaire as the most effective artistic impresario in France, had as a youth admired Matisse's work but was now coming to regard it with suspicion. Reviewing a Matisse exhibition in 1919 Cocteau spoke of 'le fauve ensoleillé devenu un petit chat de Bonnard.'
Review, 4041 words
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