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.

Henri Matisse is one of the leading figures of modern art. His unparalleled cut-outs are among the most significant of any artist's late works. When ill health first prevented Matisse from painting, he began to cut into painted paper with scissors as his primary technique to make maquettes for a number of commissions, from books and stained glass window designs to tapestries and ceramics. Taking the form of a 'studio diary', the catalogue re-examines the cut-outs in terms of the methods and materials that Matisse used, and looks at the tensions in the works between finish and process; and drawings and colour.

171 paintings concentrated on works produced by Henri Matisse during the 1920s, when he lived in the South of France.

Henri Matisse: Figure Color Space~ISBN 3-7757-1601-7 U.S. $65.00 / Clothbound, 9.75 x 12 in. / 384 pgs / 200 color and 40 b&w. ~Item / February / Art Basically, there's only one: Matisse. --Pablo Picasso

"This exhibition explores the 43-year friendship between artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Baltimore collector Etta Cone (1870-1949). More than 160 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and illustrated books provide new insights into the formation of the renowned Cone Collection, one of the greatest collections of modern art in the United States. Etta, with her older sister Claribel (1864-1929), acquired more than 700 works by Matisse between 1906 and 1949 and bequeathed the majority of them to the BMA as part of a gift of 3,000 objects. Etta's dedication and curiosity ultimately lent the Cone collection its characteristic depth and breadth. After accepting Etta's invitation to visit her in Baltimore in 1930, Matisse realized he could have a major U.S. presence, and began creating and offering Etta specific works of art with the Cone collection in mind." Among these works are masterpieces such as The Yellow Dress (1929-31) and Large Reclining Nude (1935), rarely shown drawings, and the preliminary studies for his first illustrated book, Poems by Stéphane Mallarmé (1932). The works in the exhibition are generally arranged by acquisition date, demonstrating Cone's increasingly discerning eye for Matisse's work throughout their long partnership. A fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition contains new scholarship on the formal, technical, and social aspects of the decades-long working partnership between artist and patron.