Matisse The Maste

The second in Hilary Spurling's sweeping, two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential and beloved artists of the twentieth century

Henri Matisse is one of the most beloved painters of the 20th century. Best known for his cut-outs – childlike images that he cut directly from sheets of blazing colour - Matisse wanted his art to transcend the darkness and violence of the modern age. This alone has often seen him written off as a populist crowd-pleaser, not really a serious artist. Yet what we now tend to forget is that at the beginning of his career, Matisse was a rebel and a revolutionary - one of the first artists to tear up the rules of western art to bring it into the modern world.