Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book

As such, each chapter in this well-researched and amply illustrated study shows how Matisse self-consciously engaged with literary works by authors as diverse as Stephane Mallarme, Henry de Montherlant, Charles Baudelaire, Pierre de Ronsard, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, among others, to produce and extend his own pictorial language as well as to position himself as a sophisticated reader of both the literary canon and the avant-garde. * Peter Read, Professor of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts, University of Kent, UK * Henri Matisse hails from the distinctly French tradition of the painter-poet whose creative output (as well as personal and professional life) was ine

She is the author of Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (2012). Kathryn Brown is Lecturer in Art History at Loughborough University, UK.

This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. By tracing th