Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 15 of 16 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Urge to Strangle

T.J. Clark: Matisse’s Cut-Outs, 5 June 2014

Henri MatisseThe Cut-Outs 
Tate Modern, until 7 September 2014Show More
Henri MatisseThe Cut-Outs 
MoMA, 25 October 2014 to 8 February 2015Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

I want, I shall have

Graham Robb, 17 February 2000

La Grand Thérèse or The Greatest Swindle of the Century 
by Hilary Spurling.
Profile, 128 pp., £7.99, September 1999, 9781861971326
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

The Big Show

Nicholas Penny, 25 March 1993

Henri MatisseA Retrospective 
by John Elderfield.
Thames and Hudson, 479 pp., £48, September 1992, 0 500 09231 1
Show More
Henri Matisse 1904-1917 
by Yves-Alain Bois.
Centre Pompidou, 524 pp., frs 220, February 1993, 2 85850 722 8
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

I’m not upset. It’s nerves

Julian Bell: Spurling’s Matisse, 23 February 2006

Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse Vol. II The Conquest of Colour 1909-54 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 512 pp., £25, March 2005, 0 241 13339 4
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Madame Matisse’s Hat

T.J. Clark: On Matisse, 14 August 2008

... 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 ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter Campbell: Matisse’s revelations, 19 May 2005

... 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 ...

The Misery of Not Painting like others

Peter Campbell, 13 April 2000

The Unknown MatisseMan of the North, 1869-1908 
by Hilary Spurling.
Penguin, 480 pp., £12.99, April 2000, 0 14 017604 7
Show More
MatisseFather and Son 
by John Russell.
Abrams, 416 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 8109 4378 6
Show More
Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse 
by John O’Brien.
Chicago, 284 pp., £31.50, April 1999, 0 226 61626 6
Show More
Matisse and Picasso 
by Yve-Alain Bois.
Flammarion, 272 pp., £35, February 1999, 2 08 013548 1
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Warhol’s Respectability

Nicholas Penny, 19 March 1987

The Revenge of the Philistines 
by Hilton Kramer.
Secker, 445 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 436 23687 7
Show More
Gilbert and George 
by Carter Ratcliff.
Thames and Hudson, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 500 27443 6
Show More
British Art in the 20th Century 
edited by Susan Compton.
Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 460 pp., £16.90, January 1987, 3 7913 0798 3
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

At the Barnes

Bridget Alsdorf: On Marie Laurencin, 25 January 2024

... 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 ...

Behind the Gas Lamp

Julian Barnes: Félix Fénéon, 4 October 2007

Novels in Three Lines 
by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante.
NYRB, 171 pp., £7.99, August 2007, 978 1 59017 230 8
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

At Piano Nobile

John-Paul Stonard: On R.B. Kitaj, 14 December 2023

... 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 ...

At the Royal Academy

Julian Bell: Manet, 21 February 2013

... 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 ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences