Pleasuring Painting: Matisse's Femini by John Elderfield

Pleasuring Painting: Matisse's Femini by John Elderfield

In 1913, outraged by Matisse's painterly violations of the female body, students of the Art Institute of Chicago found him guilty of "artistic murder" and proceeded to burn in effigy three of his works, including the "Blue Nude" of 1907. Since that time, Matisse's paintings of women have remained a source of deep controversy, feminist critics finding them an "assertion of virilty" whilst others have fallen back on purely formalist defences of the artist's "disinterested paint". In this work, John Elderfield, one of today's most highly regarded art historians and an expert on Matisse, traces the development of Matisse's feminine representations from the "Carmelina" of 1903-1904 through to the odalisques of the Nice period in the 1920s, offering a reinterpretation of some of the artist's best-known works. The author shows that Matisse was not, as his legend suggests, simply a painter of quintessentially male pleasures, but rather that he also used his female models as a means of self-analysis and identification. Eschewing reductive readings, Elderfield returns the images to their art historical sources and opens out the interpretative possibities of these enigmatic paintings.

The Museum of Modern Art's Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture is John Elderfield.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780500550281
ISBN 10	050055028X
Title	Pleasuring Painting: Matisse's Femini
Author	John Elderfield
Series	Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Thames & Hudson Ltd
Year published	1996-01-29
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.