Matisse's Poets

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. 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. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. 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. 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.

Kathryn Brown is Reader in Art Histories, Markets and Digital Heritage at Loughborough University, UK. Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 (2012), Matisse's Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist's Book (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Henri Matisse (2021). She is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets (Bloomsbury).

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Matisse and the Book Performing Literary Criticism Theorizing Arts of the Book: Maupassant's Influence 1. Matisse Among the Poets Modernist Genealogies Controversial Beginnings: The Two Versions of Les Jockeys camouflés Essential Lines Thresholds 2. 'Visual Thoughts': Les Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé Arts of Elimination Mirrored Space Poetic Others 3. Disowning Ulysses Homeric Frameworks Books within Books Innovation, Instability, and Tradition The Limited Editions Club in a Post-War Art World 4. The War Book: Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos (Les Crétois) Performing the 'Solar Myth' Heroism, Shame, and the Corrida From Myth to Politics 5. Imitation and Innovation: Florilège des Amours de Ronsard Appeasing the Bibliophiles Influence: A Modernist Renaissance Objectification and Identification: Portraying the Female Nude 6. Enacting Beauty: Les Fleurs du mal A New Architecture for Les Fleurs du mal Modernism and Beauty Matisse Alone: 'Les Fleurs du bien' 7. Problematizing Authorship: Les Lettres portugaises Rectificatory Justice and the Book Selfhood: Matisse's Essays on Art 8. Beyond the 'Ritual Space' of the Book: Jazz Drawing Words/Hearing Colour The Failure of Icarus 9. Old Acquaintances, New Collaborations: Tzara and Reverdy Spontaneity Redefining Ekphrasis: Visages 10. Imprisonment and Occupation: Poèmes de Charles d'Orléans A Modernist Illuminated Manuscript Illustration and Imitation Appropriating Artistic Gesture 11. Apollinaire Redux Friendship as an Interpretive Framework The Book as Portrait Women and Books: From Apollinaire to Repli 12. Literary Legacies Books out of Time Traces Bibliography Index