Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375711333
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Henri Matisse is one of the masters of twentieth-century art and a household word to millions of people who find joy and meaning in his light-filled, colorful images--yet, despite all the books devoted to his work, the man himself has remained a mystery. Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last. Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite. But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle. From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded. Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now. It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing. Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso. In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.
Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
ISBN: 0679434291
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 570
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Book Description
With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse's attempts to counteract the violence of the 20th century in paintings.
Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
The art, youth, early maturity and life of artist Henri Matisse are examined in this biography. Includes 24 pages of color reproductions.
Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 612
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Book Description
Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend - and competitor - Pablo Picasso. Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master were together heralded as the definitive biography of the artist, and Matisse the Master went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2005. In this abridged, one-volume edition, Hilary Spurling reveals the origins of Matisse's astonishing talent, provides a unique insight into his life and work, and, by documenting the difficult path he took alone, clearly places him at the front rank of those who made art modern.
Author: John Russell
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810929913
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
The relationship between the great Post-Impressionist artist Henri Matisse and his son, influential art dealer Pierre Matisse, is at the heart of this deftly revealing and moving biography, now in paperback. 96 illustrations, 48 in full color.
Author: Paule Laudon
Publisher: Vilo Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
In 1930, aged 60, Henri Matisse travelled to Tahiti on a steamer from San Francisco. The trip had a profound and lasting influence on his work, particularly the late gouache cut-outs; this book gives the reader an intensely personal insight into the mind of Matisse in Tahiti.
Author: Pierre Schneider
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 760
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Book Description
...to devote my life to the essential thing-- the thing for which I am made and which can bring a little happiness to the great family, the greatest spiritual family.--Matisse to Andre Rouveyre, September 4, 1942 Of all the artists of this century, Henri Matisse is one of the greatest and most beloved. His influence on modern art, both during his lifetime and today, has never stopped growing; in the eyes of the world, he is the French painter par excellence. Henri Matisse is all the more cherished because his work celebrates the positive aspects of life, as evidenced by the titles of many of his major paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupte, La Joie de Vivre, La Danse, Musique, to mention but a few. His explosions and juxtapositions of color and pattern inspire pure delight in the beholder, and his mastery of line, volume, and form are perhaps unequaled in the art of our time. The vitality, energy, and life-enhancing qualities that radiate from his art represent distillation of all that is affirmative in the human condition and are given immortality through that rare and indefinable quality known as genius. The art of Matisse describes a trajectory leading from realism to abstraction, from darkness to light, from the cold of the north to the heat of the south, a route marked off by such revolutionary innovations as the burst of color found in Fauvism or the invention of his cut-outs. Matisse was still creating at a time in his life when many artists are content to rest on their laurels. Since its original publication in 1984, this book by Pierre Schneider stands alone as the bible on the art of Matisse. The author spent fourteen years amassing a prodigiousamount of information on the artist, and includes his own personal and original views on the work. Including over nine hundred illustrations, this is the most substantial reference of the works of Matisse ever published. The reader will discover Matisse watercolorist, draftsman, ceramist, and the architect-- and unquestionably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Author: Monte Packham
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0500970602
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
From Cahiers d’Art, a monograph on one of the most ambitious collections of 20th-century art, and its complex, charismatic creator, Theodor Ahrenberg. Living with Matisse, Picasso, and Christo explores one of the most ambitious, and yet largely unknown, private collections of twentieth-century Western art, and its charismatic creator Theodor “Teto” Ahrenberg (1912–1989). Containing over 6,000 artworks acquired between the 1940s and late 1980s, Ahrenberg’s collection features key works by artists as distinguished and diverse as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Olle Bartling, Sam Francis, Öyvind Fahlström, Tadeusz Kantor, Lucio Fontana, Christo, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Ahrenberg’s ever-evolving collection was shaped by his commitment to the changing notion of contemporary art, his dedication to young and marginalized artists, and a self- declared conviction that he was not merely a collector but one who facilitated exhibitions, collaborations, and commissions, and who employed art as an instrument against conservatism and complacency. Ahrenberg passionately believed in personally meeting those artists whose works he acquired, and he accordingly established rich, long-term friendships that transcended the conventional artist-collector dynamic.
Author: Sue Roe
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143108123
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Previously published: London: Fig Tree, [2014].
Author: Bettina Hahnloser
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783777434384
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Hahnloser Collection was created in the early twentieth century in close friendly exchange between the collectors Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler and their famous artist friends. The publication presents some 120 works providing an overview of this unique international collection of Swiss and French modernism as well as illustrating its exemplary cultural-political character.00The catalogue sheds light on the collectors? close contact with their artist friends including Pierre Bonnard, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Matisse and Félix Vallotton. It provides an insight into unknown aspects of the artists? lives, their creative work and the motivation and passions of the collectors themselves. Today the collection is largely in the possession of the collectors? heirs or has been donated to the art museums of Bern and Winterthur.00Exhibition: Albertina Museum, Wien, Austria (22.02. - 23.05.2020).
