Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hardcover. Blue cloth, gilt letters on spine, bright yellow dj. 284 pp. 87 color & bw plates. VG (Ex-gallery copy with only few marks, slight natural soil marks to dj, othewise quite clean.). Item #20279
ISBN: 0226616266
"Argues that Matisse's sober presentations of himself were calculated to fit with the social constraints and ideological demands of the times. Matisse's strategy included cooperating with museums, cultivating private collectors, playing off dealers once against another, and reassuring the media that, whatever his reputation as an avant-gardist, the conduct of his life was solidly bouregois. ...This intriguing, wide-ranging investigation of Matisse's self-promotion, America's uneasy embrace of modernism, and America's consumer culture and politics provides a rich context to Clement Greenberg's words published in the Nation in 1947: 'Matisse's cold hedonism and ruthless exclusion of everything but the concrete, immediate sensation will in the future, once we are away from the present Zeitgeist, be better understood as the most profound mood of the first half of the twentieth century.'" (dj).
Price: $29.97