Matisse: invitation to the voyage

Abstract

"The volume is anchored by and named after Charles Baudelaire's 1857 poem 'Invitation to the Voyage,' to which Matisse repeatedly referred in his lifetime. Following Baudelaire's poem, the book is thus conceived as a journey through the work and life of Matisse, in which travel played an important role. Published alongside the Matisse retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, this monograph sails across the many waves of the artist's practice. Beginning with his early paintings from around 1900, Invitation to the Voyage then carries the reader from his revolutionary Fauvist works of the 1910s to the sensual paintings of his Nice period in the 1930s and his legendary silhouettes of the late 1940s and 1950s. The wealth of important paintings, sculptures and silhouettes gathered here reveals the development and richness of Matisse's masterful oeuvre."--Publisher's description.

Contents

Foreword and acknowledgments / Sam Keller and Raphaël Bouvier -- Matisse: Invitation to the voyage / Raphaël Bouvier -- Artistic beginnings / Patrice Deparpe -- 1869-1904 -- The liberation of color and a new formal language / Dita Amory -- 1905-1908 -- The Issy Studio and the Moroccan paintings / Anne Theŕy -- 1909-1913 -- Artistic experiments during World War I / John Elderfield -- 1914-1917 -- Matisse and Baudelaire : luxe, calme et volupté / Robert Kopp -- Breaks in the idyll / Larissa Dätwyler -- Matisse's artistic gaze and "the feminine" as other / Griselda Pollock -- The early Nice period and the odalisque paintings / Alix Agret -- 1918-1929 -- A new starting point : Lydia Delectorskaya / Ellen McBreen -- 1930-1940 -- The shift toward the cut-outs and the last paintings / Claudine Grammont -- 1941-1948 -- Large-scale decorative compositions and the blue nudes / Jodi Hauptman -- 1949-1954 -- Exhibited works.