Hardcover
2014 · New Haven and London
by McBreen, Ellen
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Hardcover. VG (Average wear to dj edges, otherwise clean.). Black cloth, red & color illus. dust jacket, 228 pp., color & BW illus. Provides an interesting approach to the sculpture of French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954). "Long perceived as a side pursuit to his celebrated painting career, Henry Matisse's sculpture gets an overdue critical examination in this book. Beginning in 1906, soon after the artist acquired his first African sculpture, Matisse found inspiration in erotic and ethnographic photography, which had become inexpensively mass-produced thanks to advances in halftone technology. Working from these two radically different depictions of the body -- one hand carved, the only mechanically made -- was a foundational method for Matisse and crucial to the development of his pre-World War I abstraction. [This book plots] new coordinates of study for early twentieth-century primivitism. It examines the larger constructs of thought at the time, with a penetrating analysis of anthropology, popular erotica, and the visual culture of French. In addition, the book repositions Matisse's sculptural practice, particularly in regard to its investigations of race and sexuality, as a cornerstone of his prolific career." (dj).
(Inventory #: 154850)