Matisse: Father and SonMatisse, Father & Son, a revealing and moving biography, is based upon exclusive access to several thousand unpublished letters in the archives of Pierre Matisse. These include more than 800 letters, many of them twelve or thirteen pages long, between Pierre Matisse and his father. They also include a vast correspondence with the European artists whom Pierre Matisse represented during his sixty years as an art dealer in New York. But this is more than a book of letters, John Russell, former chief art critic for The New York Times, has produced a seamless narrative that moves easily back and forth between private life and professional life. The heart of this absorbing biography is the near daily correspondence between father and son over three decades. Mining thousands of letters in which nothing is held back - and including photos of family and friends, as well as significant works handled by Pierre Matisse - John Russell offers us an insider's view into the lives and creative efforts of some of the century's most important artists. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 6 |
A Note from the Author | 7 |
A Checkered Childhood 19001920 | 9 |
The Young Pierre 192024 | 17 |
An American Dream 192425 | 27 |
A Novice in New York 1925 | 34 |
A Turn for the Better Maybe 192631 | 43 |
Patron or Pest? 1930 | 59 |
Exiles in New York 193945 | 201 |
Life in a Defeated France 194142 | 217 |
The War Ended 194246 | 235 |
Miró Rediscovered 194248 | 249 |
The Case of Dubuffet 194460 | 272 |
Buoyant but Then 194849 | 299 |
The Last Years 195166 | 319 |
Miró 1950 Onwards | 341 |
On His Own at Last 193139 | 78 |
The Programme in Place 1934 | 97 |
Joan Miró Comes Aboard 193240 | 110 |
The Poetics of Balthus 193588 | 133 |
A Man from Maloja 193650 | 146 |
A Gruesome Year 1939 | 175 |
Father and Son in 1940 | 185 |
Triumph and Tribulation | 356 |
A New Cast of Characters 195490 | 379 |
Adieu | 399 |
Index | 403 |
Credits | 413 |
Copyright | |