The UK’s first public showing of Henri Matisse’s art books opens at The Walker this month. Laura Davis reports
AMONG their pages, foppish French courtiers fall head over heels in love, kings defy gods, monsters are conceived through bizarre romances and a famous artist pontificates on flower arranging.
They are Henri Matisse’s art books, an alluring collection of etchings, linoprints, lithographs and text exhibited for the first time in the UK at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.
When the show opens later this month, pages from four of the influential French painters’ volumes will be displayed in frames alongside a selection of other art books from National Museums Liverpool’s collection.
Just a small number of each one was published during Matisse’s lifetime, as a more affordable way of collecting his art.
“He would get really intense about the projects he was working on and when he would reach a point when his creativity just wasn’t flowing it would make him physically ill,” says the Walker’s head of fine art, Ann Bukantis.
“When he would reach a creative block with his paintings he would look for something that would fire him up again.”
The books gave Matisse another way of tackling his art.
The first was the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, a French symbolist whose multi-layered writing was often dismissed by critics as inaccessible.
