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“... Crowds​ gather at the heart of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, drawn to an artless home movie showing the master at work. He looks, and was, extremely unwell. Not even a rakish straw hat, part cowboy part Maurice Chevalier, can divest the scene of its pathos. There is a spot of time in the movie, after Matisse has finished his fierce fast cutting of the usual vegetable-flower-seaweed-jellyfish shapes (the ones he works on here are not unlike the clusters of yellow in the centre of Mimosa), when the speed suddenly slackens and the old man holds the limp paper in his hands as if reluctant to let go ...”

“... The role of Thérèse Humbert and her family in the life of Henri Matisse was one of the revelations of the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s pioneering biography: The Unknown Matisse. For more than twenty years, the Humberts were a major force in the social and political life of the Third Republic, until, in 1902, their legendary wealth was exposed as a hoax ...”

“... on by large galleries. Big shows play safe. Monet (more Monet shows are in preparation), Van Gogh, Matisse are the ideal subjects. The Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which closed in January and can now be seen in abbreviated form at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has been one of the most successful ...”

“... The subtitle Hilary Spurling has given to the second half of her biography of Henri Matisse is upbeat and triumphant, in line with orthodox interpretations of the painter’s career: ‘The Conquest of Colour’. To place the volume still more squarely in line with exhibition-poster stereotypes, she has capped that with ‘Matisse the Master ...”

“... Henri Matisse, ‘Woman with a Hat’ Henri Matisse’s portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse’s painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it ...”

“... wonderful subjects for this kind of photography when it was in its lively prime. The pictures of Matisse’s rooms in the exhibition Matisse: His Art and His Textiles (at the Royal Academy until 30 May and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 23 June until 25 September), many of them by ...”

“... Because Matisse’s work (his late work, anyway) seldom involves any alienating display of skill or aggressive degree of difficulty, he persuades us that our ordinary visual pleasures could, were they to be extraordinarily intensified, be the same as his. He is thus vulnerable to the admirer’s revenge: to an intrusive assumption of intimacy on our part ...”

“... Andy Warhol ‘represent a decisive break with the tradition that comes out of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, et al, is only to state the obvious’. Indeed it is obvious from Warhol’s own boring descriptions of himself. It must also be obvious that the collectors and curators and critics who were responsible for promoting the reputation of ...”

“... But the Laurencin essay is less a survey of her work than a patchwork of paragraphs on Picasso, Henri Rousseau and the Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, with only a handful of sentences on ‘the entirely feminine aesthetic’ of the modern ‘paintress’. Laurencin’s art, Apollinaire writes, ‘dances like Salomé’ between Picasso and ...”

“... owner of the best eye in Paris as the century turned, promoter of Seurat, the only galleryist Matisse ever trusted; journalist, ghost-writer for Colette’s Willy, literary adviser then chief editor of the Revue Blanche; friend of Verlaine, Huysmans and Mallarmé, publisher of Laforgue, editor and organiser of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations; publisher of ...”

“... Degas’s pastel works in the mid-1970s he went to La Maison du Pastel in the Marais, bought some Henri Roché crayons ‘from two ancient sisters who may have served Degas’ and determined to ‘draw better than any Jew who ever lived, as a riposte to my anti-Dreyfusard master’. Degas was one of his favourite antisemites, Kitaj wrote; the others were ...”

“... in between, however, a portrait might record a painter’s debates with himself. The head of Henri Rochefort – another, edgier, more charismatic politician – becomes a pitted battleground in which every turn of the modelling has been secured only at hard cost. This was painted when Manet was already terminally ill. He, not Rochefort, proposed the ...”

“... poison: they insist on the poison without any overwhelming fear of the costs. David Bowie and Henri Cartier-Bresson, not contra-cabaret overall, were separately and summarily dismissed from the Colony for requesting tea.In former times, before we took the pledge, Soho had 24-hour allure. On my way home one night, I left a famous screenwriter behind the ...”

“... sympathy between things rather than an obvious disparity. By this time Magritte had begun to read Henri Bergson, whom Danchev quotes here: ‘Our memory runs from the perception to previous images which resemble it and which our impulses have already sketched. Thus it creates afresh a current perception.’ Typically, Magritte came up with a formula for the ...”

“... zero of the bourgeois imagination), the Eiffel Tower, the unearthly reading rooms done by Henri Labrouste for the Bibliothèque Nationale and Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, maybe Hector Guimard’s Metro entrances, certainly the lost Galerie des Machines. But the arcades are central for him, because he senses that only in them are the true silliness ...”