Volume 46, Number 1 · January 14, 1999
The Triumph of Matisse
By Richard Dorment
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, 1869-1908
by Hilary Spurling
Knopf, 480 pp., $40.00
We tend to think of Henri Matisse as the grand bourgeois of twentieth-century art. In the famous series of photographs showing him in old age surrounded by the paper cutouts with which he was then illustrating The Thousand and One Nights, he is the embodiment of material comfort and of serene self-composure. Picasso, austere painter of the darkest forces in human nature, once said that art comes 'from Sadness and Pain.' Matisse is remembered for comparing art to 'a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.'
Review, 4062 words
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