Matisse: Painter as Sculptor

Widely known for his vibrant and innovative modernist paintings and works on paper, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) also produced a large number of sculptures that were equally groundbreaking. This original and lavishly illustrated book examines more than forty of Matisse’s sculptures and joins them with his paintings, drawings, prints, and collages to investigate the relationship between his two-dimensional and three-dimensional work.
Essays present an overview of Matisse’s creative invention in sculpture and address his sculptural process from beginning to end. The volume presents the results of exciting new technical studies on Matisse’s working and casting methods. A selection of works on paper, paintings, and photographs unveils the evolution of his sculptural ideas––highlighting the importance of drawings to his process––and explores the fascinating issue of why he often painted images of his sculptures into many of his major works. Archival and installation photographs reveal how Matisse originally intended his works to be viewed.
Matisse: Painter as Sculptor also examines the artist's work in the context of late-19th- and early-20th-century sculpture. Works by Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Alberto Giacometti, Jacques Lipschitz, and Auguste Rodin address important questions of influence, affinity, and the meaning of modernism in Matisse's sculpture.

Ellen Bates - Library Journal

This exhibition catalog for a show traveling through February 2008 to Dallas, San Francisco, and Baltimore makes up a four-museum collaboration focusing on Matisse's sculptures. (The museums include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) Matisse's sculptures are rarely treated separately from his paintings, so this book is an original exploration. To the artist, sculpture was a "dialectic" between "the grasped and the seen," and when he started sculpting, he indicated that he was an amateur, an attitude that granted him the breathing room to develop into a world-class sculptor who produced 80 works. Matisse's influences (e.g., his admiration for Rodin), methods of casting and analysis of materials, subject matter, affinity for his contemporaries, and the relationship of his own paintings and drawings to the creation of his sculptures and their place in modernism are all highlighted in the five essays by noted art historians. The catalog section that follows is fully illustrated and highly informative. To be appreciated by specialists, students, and museum goers who enjoy Matisse, this book is a necessary purchase for all modern art book collections.

Ann Boulton is Objects Conservator, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Jay Fisher is Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Dorothy Kosinski is Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and the Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art. Steven A. Nash is Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Oliver Shell is Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, The Baltimore Museum of Art.