Contains photographs of sculptures created by Henri Matisse.

"In 1906, soon after Matisse acquired his first African sculpture, he began the first of his nudes based on erotic and ethnographic photographs. This reading of Matisse's early sculpture examines the artist's appropriations from two seemingly disparate visions of the body: commercial nude photography and African sculpture. Why would Matisse synthesize mechanically made traces of actual flesh with the hand-carved abstractions of Pende, Senufo, Baga, and Baule figural sculptures? In the twentieth century, halftone technology in France changed economics of photographic reproduction. The inexpensive illustrated revues where Matisse found substitutes for living models were full of plates, making the female body available for mass consumption as never before. One of the main appeals of African sculpture to Matisse and others was that it appeared as a productive antithesis to this; it represented an alternative experience and understanding of human sexuality. In this, Matisse's primitivism was as much a system of beliefs projected onto African sculptures and actual African bodies, as a series of visual and conceptual borrowings from them. To support this idea, the book uses primary materials from turn-of-the-century ethnography and comparative anthropology, popular erotica, and the visual culture of French colonialism. It draws connections between artistic debts and the ideological and historical forces informing them, and plots new study in a now-familiar story of early twentieth-century modernist primitivism. This book challenges an established convention about Matisse--a painter who sculpted merely as a "rest"-- proposing how the sculpture's play with period perceptions of race and gender is key to understanding the artist's fascinations with cultural and sexual origins"--

Published to accompany the Royal Academy exhibition 'Matisse in the Studio', 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. Featured frequently in the modern master's bold paintings, drawings, and cut-outs, and influencing the development of his work in sculpture, Matisse's objects formed a secret history hiding in plain sight. Works that span the artist'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. With lush illustrations and archival images, Matisse in the Studio provides exceptional insights into the world of the artist at work.

In this innovative new series, readers will learn about four of the world's best known artists--Monet, Matisse, Cezanne, and Van Gogh--and they'll also get activity ideas that will inspire them to create their own masterpieces. Each Art Activity Pack comes with a paperback book about the artist and focuses on one of the concepts behind his work. In addition, the Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh Packs include an art activity book and a poster to color. The Matisse Pack includes stencils and brightly colored paper young artists can cut to create their own collages. Included in the Art Activity Packs: (Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh) Full Color Book Art Activity Book (Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh) Large Format Poster (Matisse) Stencils & Colored Paper

One day, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) cut a small bird out of a piece of white paper. It was a simple shape, but he liked the way it looked and didn't want to throw it away, so he pinned it to the wall of his room. But the bird looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it, and before he knew it, he had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens filled with brightly coloured plants and animals and shapes of all sizes. Featuring colourful cut-paper illustrations and Matisse's own cut-outs, Matisse's Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist's never-ending curiosity and continuous process of trying new things helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art. Children will see how Matisse used nothing but paper and scissors to create simple shapes like squares, leaves and birds, and experimented with scraps of leftover paper and new colour combinations to create lush gardens on his studio walls.

"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.

First published in 1996. The art of the extraordinary French artist, Henri Matisse (1869- 1954), has provided visual pleasures and intellectual challenges to its viewers for the last hundred years. This is collection of gathered, summarized, and evaluated major literature on the artist primarily from France, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, where major Matisse collections bear witness to early and intense interest in the artist's work.

Tells the story of the artist Matisse designing the Chapelle du Rosaire.