An account of Henri Matisse's activity as a maker of portraits and self-portraits. The author considers the transaction that produces a portrait - a transaction between the artist and the sitter that is social as much as artistic - and investigates the social contexts of Matisse's sitters.

Invites young readers to touch twentieth-century paintings, including Matisse's "Goldfish," Grant Wood's "American Gothic," and Chagall's "Birthday." On board pages.

Discusses the French painter's visits to Morocco in 1912 and 1913, the works he painted there, and the influence of his stay on his later career

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 The book includes unpublished correspondence and other original documents related to Courthion's interview and abounds with details about avant-garde life, tactics, and artistic creativity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.

The extraordinary relationship between Henry Matisse and Pablo Picasso is one of the most important and eventful narratives in modern art. Between them, they set the course of western art history in the first half of the twentieth century, where Renaissance one-point perspective and realism were abandoned for radical ideas about depicting the third dimension. Their artistic rivalry and collaboration began the new story of modernism. This publication examines the paths of these two artists over the years and the way they each responded to the other's work.

"Recounts the publication history of nearly fifty books illustrated by Henri Matisse, including Lettres portugaises, Mallarmae's Poaesies, and Matisse's own Jazz. Explores his illustration methods, typographic precepts, literary sensibilities, and opinions about the role of the artist in the publication process"--Provided by publisher.