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.

"Throughout his long career, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) continually expanded the boundaries of his art. By repeating images in pairs, trios, and series, he conducted an ongoing dialogue with his earlier works in order to, as he put it, "push further and deeper into true painting." In this fresh approach to a much-studied artist, prominent scholars from the United States and Europe examine more than sixty works in concise chapters that focus on this aspect of Matisse's working process. From early pairs such as Young Sailor I and II (1906) and Le Lexe I and II (1907-8) through a series of late studio scenes from Vence (1946-48), Matisse is shown revisiting a given theme with the aim of devising innovative, often radical, solutions to such problems as how to portray light, handle paint, select colors, and manipulate perspective. New technical studies of the early paired works and photographs documenting the evolution of his later paintings help to elucidate Matisse's complex evolution. In numerous excerpts from letters and interviews, he is revealed as an artist who regularly questioned himself and his methods, a man of powerful intellect who regarded each new painting as an adventure. A significant addition to art historical literature, Matisse: In Search of True Painting is a revelatory study of a seminal figure in 20th-century modernism."--Page 4 of cover.

This lavish book is the first full treatment of the stunning artist books created by Henri Matisse in the mid-20th century. Matisse would select a text (or texts) by an author he admired and create an entire production of visual art around it. Matisse created books around the work of French poets like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Ronsard. He made a fascinating edition of the French version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. And then there was his radically modern book-so popular in the US-that visualized the themes and patterns of American Jazz (Jazz, 1941-47).

Step into the colorful world of Henri Matisse and his magnificent paper cutouts in this biography by acclaimed picture book creator Jeanette Winter. In a small weaving town in France, a young boy named Henri-Emile Matisse drew pictures everywhere, and when he grew up, he moved to Paris and became a famous artist who created paintings that were adored around the world. But late in life a serious illness confined him to a wheelchair, and amazingly, it was from there that he created among his most beloved works—enormous and breathtaking paper cutouts. Based on the life of Henri Matisse, this moving and inspirational picture book biography includes a note from the author, dynamic quotes from Matisse himself, and an illuminating look at a little-known part of a great artist’s creative process.

The drawings that Matisse produced in the mid-1930s were those he valued as amongst his very greatest achievements. And finely reproduced as they are here, they astonish, delight and seduce everyone who sees them by their verve, their audacity and their voluptuousness. Made in pen and ink, admitting of no correction, devoid of shading or hatching they are, as Matisse said of them, 'the most direct expression of my emotion'. These portraits and drawings of models reclining in and against profusely patterned textiles and ornamented backgrounds, are miracles of pure line, of fluid arabesques seemingly spontaneous and free, yet rationally controlled to embody the height of exoticism and sensuality. The naked and clothed models, mirrors, reflections of sprawling limbs and of the artist himself or his own hand drawing, spread in waves across the whiteness of the paper to beguile us and take our breath away at Matisse's sheer virtuosity in making a simple line evoke the complexities of space and form. There was no delay in recognizing these miracles of draughtsmanship as a sort of pinnacle of perfection and in 1936 Christian Zervos reproduced a selection of them in his journal Cahiers d'Art. This present volume is a near facsimile of that special edition.