Buchberg, Karl, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, Samantha Friedman and Flavia Friger, eds. — Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. First Edition. Softcover. Size: Large 8vo 9" - 10. Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, Samantha Friedman and Flavia Friger have edited this fine and due homage to the French painter and colorist Henri Matisse following a lengthy museum exhibition of the same name. Contributions by them and also by Markus Gross, Jodi Hauptman, Stephan Lohrengel and Nicholas Serota. Two hundred-fifty black-and-white illustrations and 54 in full color, printed on high-gloss paper. Sterling condition softcover copy in tall, Imperial octavo size, measuring 10 1/2" tall x 9" wide. Unfurled tips, tight binding, and clean internals, showing only very slight shelf- and edge-wear to the glossy pictorial wraps, in gate-fold. From the publisher's blurb, "Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs, made from the early 1940s until the artist’s death in 1954, this publication presents approximately 150 works in a groundbreaking reassessment of Matisse’s colorful and innovative final chapter. The result of research conducted on two fronts--conservation and curatorial--the catalogue offers a reconsideration of the cut-outs by exploring a host of technical and conceptual issues: the artist's methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice; their economy of means and exploitation of decorative strategies; their environmental aspects; and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and ultimately made permanent, a transformation accomplished via mounting and framing. Richly illustrated to present the cut-outs in all of their vibrancy and luminosity, the book includes an introduction and a conservation essay that consider the cut-outs from new theoretical and technical perspectives, and five thematic essays, each focusing on a different moment in the development of the cut-out practice, that provide a chronicle of this radical medium’s unfolding, and period photographs that show the works in process in Matisse’s studio. One of modern art's towering figures, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. From the clashing hues of his Fauvist works made in the South of France in 1904–05, to the harmonies of his Nice interiors from the 1920s, to this brilliant final chapter, Matisse followed a career-long path that he described as "construction by means of color." As for the contributions to this major exhibit, Karl Buchberg is Senior Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art. Nicholas Cullinan is Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Jodi Hauptman is a Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art. Samantha Friedman is an assistant curator of the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Flavia Frigeri is an assistant curator at Tate Modern in London; she is the organizing curator for Tate’s Young Patrons. [5], 6-298 pp.Member, I.O.B.A., C.B.A., and adherent to the highest ethical standards. . . . Fine