Matisse: The Bigger Picture by Prestel presents an expansive survey of Henri Matisse’s oeuvre, tracing his restless reinvention of painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and decoration across more than five decades. Matisse in many ways is the ultimate artist, the figure that changed the course of art history and this book encapsulates this evolution perfectly.

“The artist must look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time,” Matisse once wrote, an injunction he remained faithful to throughout a life devoted to experimentation and continual renewal. From his earliest academic training in Paris to the radical chromatic experiments that helped define Fauvism (the chapter on the Fauves is fascinating), Matisse consistently approached art with a spirit of discovery, transforming both the means and the language of modern visual expression.

Born Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869–1954), the French artist is widely regarded, alongside Pablo Picasso, as one of the central figures in the innovative developments that reshaped early twentieth-century art. Between 1900 and 1905, his bold, intense use of colour earned him notoriety as a leading Fauve (“wild beast”), and in the decade after 1906, he developed a rigorous style emphasising flattened forms, decorative patterning and an expressive economy of line. In 1917, Matisse relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, where the relaxed luminosity of the Mediterranean landscape informed a more measured, classical sensibility in his work, consolidating his critical reputation. From the 1930s onward, he embraced an ever-bolder simplification of form, culminating in the late gouache paper cut-outs, created when ill health curtailed his ability to paint, which remain among the most innovative achievements of modern art.

Written by Anne Sefrioui, author of numerous acclaimed art books for Prestel, including Hiroshige: Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (2021), Kingfisher with Lotus Flower: Birds of Japan (2022), Van Gogh: The Bigger Picture (2024) and Monet: The Bigger Picture (2025), the volume combines scholarly insight with visual sophistication, through rich texts and beautiful reproductions of Matisse’s most significant works. That bright red cover is iconic!

Through around sixty important works, the volume traces Matisse’s unceasing quest for discovery, centering his practice within a wide constellation of influences, from Cezanne to the visual cultures of the Orient, as well as the inspiration he drew from his extensive travels. Matisse’s oeuvre, marked by fluid draughtsmanship, audacious colour, and a remarkable sense of freedom, reveals the work of a genius who consistently broke constraints in pursuit of a profound joie de vivre.

The book itself is a meticulously designed object. Bound in linen with coloured edges, it reproduces 93 colour illustrations across 172 pages. Six major compositions are presented as expansive, map-like fold-outs, offering readers a rare opportunity to engage intimately with the scale, intricacy and ambition of Matisse’s masterpieces. Compact and colour-accurate, it is a book no art library should be without.

Originally published by Hazan and Prestel, one of the world’s leading publishers in the fields of art, architecture, photography and design, Matisse: The Bigger Picture is as compelling in its production as in its subject, inviting close attention to the decisions that shaped a career defined by continual reinvention.

Richly textured and nuanced, this volume encourages readers to examine the creative decisions that defined a lifetime of artistic reinvention. If you need one book about Matisse, this is the one!

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