Henri Matisse

The volume is anchored by and named after Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” to which Matisse repeatedly referred in his lifetime. Following Baudelaire’s poem, the book is thus conceived as a journey through the work and life of Matisse, in which travel played an important role.
Published alongside the Matisse retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, this monograph sails across the many waves of the artist’s practice. Beginning with his early paintings from around 1900, Invitation to the Voyage then carries the reader from his revolutionary Fauvist works of the 1910s to the sensual paintings of his Nice period in the 1930s and his legendary silhouettes of the late 1940s and 1950s. The wealth of important paintings, sculptures and silhouettes gathered here reveals the development and richness of Matisse’s masterful oeuvre.
Henri Matisse (1869–1954) is one of Modernism’s leading exponents. By liberating color from its conventional associations and simplifying forms, he redefined painting and brought a hitherto unknown lightness to art. Matisse was also an innovator in sculpture, and in his late silhouettes he developed an unmistakable interplay between painting, drawing and sculpture.

Created in 1911, Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio would go on to become one of the most influential works in the history of modern art. The painting, which has hung in MoMA’s galleries since 1949, depicts the artist’s studio in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, filled with his own artworks, furniture and decorative objects. Matisse’s radical decision to saturate the work’s surface with red has fascinated generations of scholars and artists, yet much remained to be discovered about the painting’s genesis and history.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition that reunites the artworks shown in The Red Studio for the first time since they left Matisse’s work space, this copiously illustrated catalog examines the paintings and sculptures depicted in it, from familiar works such as Young Sailor II (1906) to lesser-known pieces whose locations have only recently been discovered. A narrative essay by Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Dorthe Aagesen, Chief Curator and Senior Researcher at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, traces the life of The Red Studio, from the initial commissioning of the work in 1911 through its early history of exhibition and ownership to its arrival at MoMA after World War II. The book features a rich selection of archival materials, including photographs, letters and ephemera, many of which have never before been published or exhibited. With its groundbreaking research and close reading of the work, Matisse: The Red Studio transforms our understanding of this landmark of 20th-century art.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the museum founded by the artist in his hometown of Le Cateau-Cambrésis in 1952 pays tribute to a native son.

This catalog sheds light on the first 20 years of Matisse’s career, a period never before revealed so completely, from the early works after his discovery of painting in 1890 and his years of academic training all the way to his own school in Paris, where he taught until 1911.

Focusing on these formative years of crucial importance for his identity, Becoming Matisse reveals how he became a painter and dissects the creative process of a man who copied the great masters of the past, drawing both on them and on his contemporaries in order to turn all the rules upside down and establish his position alongside those whose works he contemplated.

The catalog presents exemplary works made available by unprecedented loans from the Matisse family and international cultural institutions, as well as essays by experts on Matisse.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) is universally known for his iconic paintings, the centerpieces of museum collections throughout the world. However, somewhat less well known is his work as printmaker and engraver between the years 1900 and 1954, the year of his death. His engraving work encompasses more than 800 pieces that comprise a gigantic visual library, offering a complete document about his working process and his way of transforming his visual material into art.

This striking hardcover book with a metallic stamped cover includes 63 of the French master's engravings done throughout his life that track alongside the subjects and interests that made their way into his work as his style developed. These subjects, overwhelmingly women, included classical nudes, women dressed in North African costume, portraits and a print version of Matisse's celebrated mural for the Barnes Foundation, The Dance.

This book is the first in English to explore the essential role that Henri Matisse’s personal collection of objects played in his studio practice. The artist traveled with his collection even to temporary residences, and letters to family members often included requests for objects to be moved to where he was working, revealing them to be critical creative stimulants. Featured frequently in the modern master’s bold paintings, drawings and cutouts, and influencing the development of his work in sculpture, Matisse’s objects formed a secret history hiding in plain sight.

Works that span Matisse’s entire career are presented here alongside the objects that inspired them, from Asian vases and African masks to intricate textiles from the Islamic world. An introduction and five chapters take readers through studies of the object as actor and the studio as theater, the importance of African art in Matisse’s renderings of the human form and his sitters’ inner selves, and the invention and transformation of his own language of signs. With lush illustrations and archival images, Matisse in the Studio provides exceptional insights into the artist at work.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. He followed a career-long path that he described as “construction by means of color.”

Ellen McBreen is Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, Massachusetts.

Helen Burnham is Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Ann Dumas is Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Jack Flam is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and President of the Dedalus Foundation.

Claudine Grammont is Director and Chief Curator of the Musée Matisse, Nice.

Hélène Ivanoff is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Frobenius Institute of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt.

Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Seligny is the former Director and Chief Curator of the Musée Matisse, Nice.

Karl Buchberg is Senior Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art.

Nicholas Cullinan is Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Jodi Hauptman is a Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art.

Samantha Friedman is an assistant curator of the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art.

Flavia Frigeri is an assistant curator at Tate Modern in London; she is the organizing curator for Tate’s Young Patrons.

Nicholas Serota is director of Tate Modern's art museums and galleries.

Jodi Hauptman is a Curator in the Department of Drawings & Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Karl Buchberg is a Senior Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Samantha Friedman is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings & Prints at MoMA.

Nicholas Cullinan is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Praise for Matisse: The Chapel at Vence:

Includes a wealth of sketches and models ... tells us much about Matisse's process. . . . The images sing with colour -Architectural Review November 2013
Marie-Therese Pulvenis de Seligny has been curator of the Musee Matisse since 1997, and has organized numerous exhibitions and written extensively on the artist.