Elizabeth Cowling – författare

A unique opportunity to experience the full brilliance of Matisse, featuring major works from museums, foundations, and private collections—many rarely shown in the United States.This definitive volume offers an unparalleled look at Henri Matisse’s lifelong pursuit of form, created to accompany a landmark exhibition. Showcasing more than fifty paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, it brings together a remarkable range of material in one beautifully crafted book.The publication underscores the interdisciplinary nature of Matisse’s practice, presenting the dialogue between the artist’s two- and three-dimensional work. It traces his evolution from the early years of the twentieth century through his boldly innovative postwar period.A major contribution to Matisse studies and an indispensable resource for collectors, scholars, and art enthusiasts, this volume preserves a rare, non-traveling exhibition for a global audience—offering a vivid, enduring record of Matisse’s transformative vision.

A pioneering study of how Picasso, Braque, and Gris engaged with the pictorial tradition of illusion and deception in their influential Cubist worksThe age-old tradition of pictorial illusionism, known as trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”), employs visual tricks that confound the viewer’s perception of reality and fiction, truth and falsehood. This radically new take on Cubism shows how Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris both parodied and paid homage to classic trompe l’oeil themes and motifs with wit and invention. More than one hundred illustrated works juxtapose Cubist paintings, drawings, and collages with related compositions by the old masters. Essays based on new research explore connections between the Cubists and the trompe l’oeil specialists of earlier centuries and their games of creative one-upmanship. The informed and engaging texts trace the changing status of trompe l’oeil over the centuries, reveal Braque’s training in artisanal trompe l’oeil techniques as an integral part of his Cubist practice, examine the materials used in Gris’s collages, and discuss the previously unstudied trompe l’oeil iconography within Cubist still lifes—including newspapers, word puns, pictures-within-pictures, imitation wood grain, and tools of the trade.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(October 20, 2022–January 22, 2023)