Ed : Brooklyn College and City University of New York, Revised edition, Includesnew texts, introduction, biography, overview.

"The major writings of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), with the exception of the letters, are collected here along with transcriptions of important interviews and broadcasts given at various stages of Matisse's career. Jack Flam provides a biography, a general introduction that addresses the development of Matisse's aesthetic values and theories, and a critical introduction for each text."--Page 4 of cover

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.

In 1941 the Swiss art critic Pierre Courthion interviewed Henri Matisse while the artist was in bed recovering from a serious operation. It was an extensive interview, seen at the time as a vital assessment of Matisse's career and set to be published by Albert Skira's then newly established Swiss press. After months of complicated discussions between Courthion and Matisse, and just weeks before the book was to come out--the artist even had approved the cover design--Matisse suddenly refused its publication. A typescript of the interview now resides in Courthion's papers at the Getty Research Institute. This rich conversation, conducted during the Nazi occupation of France, is published for the first time in this volume, where it appears both in English translation and in the original French version. Matisse unravels memories of his youth and his life as a bohemian student in Gustave Moreau's atelier. He recounts his experience with collectors, including Albert C. Barnes. He discusses fame, writers, musicians, politicians, and, most fascinatingly, his travels. Chatting with Henri Matisse, introduced by Serge Guilbaut, contains a preface by Claude Duthuit, Matisse's grandson, and essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Laurence Bertrand Dorleac. The book includes unpublished correspondence and other original documents related to Courthion's interview and abounds with details about avant-garde life, tactics, and artistic creativity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Discusses the life and work of French post-impressionist artist Henri Matisse.