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A review by cryo_guy
In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
4.0
I enjoyed this a lot. As a biography, it's very readable. While it uses intricate details of primary sources--letters, journals, etc.--, it's never cumbersome. If anything, I thought it was a bit light on substance, but I can't judge a book too hard for being readable and this one still does a good job with its subject.
Its short chapters begin as snapshots of the times. In fact, at the beginning I was a bit bored because it didn't get to Picasso. However, shortly, it wasn't hard to get involved in how he and Matisse would emerge from the Paris art scene, tracking their various influences and the people in their circles. I particularly enjoyed quotations where the artists explained part of their approach to painting and there are representative snippets from Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and some other artists I was less familiar with but I learned their significance to, as the book says, the birth of Modernist art, like the fauvists-Derain and Vlaminck. The lives of the artists are packaged in a neat narrative that has no particular tension except the squabbles and dramas that one person might have with another; Matisse was particularly sensitive. And some famous debates are touched on, like the origin of synthetic cubism (Braque or Picasso) or Matisse and Picasso's "feud."
So yeah, definitely worth a read if you're interested in Picasso and Matisse, not to mention the Fauvists, but Braque, Modigliani, among others. I love a good book that tracks the conceptual thread of some historical thing or another. While I would say in the realm of art I favor either the impressionists/post-impressionists or the abstract expressionists both before and after these modernists, but I still, having seen so many of these very famous early 20th century paintings, loved reading about them and doubly appreciated the sociohistorical context.
Its short chapters begin as snapshots of the times. In fact, at the beginning I was a bit bored because it didn't get to Picasso. However, shortly, it wasn't hard to get involved in how he and Matisse would emerge from the Paris art scene, tracking their various influences and the people in their circles. I particularly enjoyed quotations where the artists explained part of their approach to painting and there are representative snippets from Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and some other artists I was less familiar with but I learned their significance to, as the book says, the birth of Modernist art, like the fauvists-Derain and Vlaminck. The lives of the artists are packaged in a neat narrative that has no particular tension except the squabbles and dramas that one person might have with another; Matisse was particularly sensitive. And some famous debates are touched on, like the origin of synthetic cubism (Braque or Picasso) or Matisse and Picasso's "feud."
So yeah, definitely worth a read if you're interested in Picasso and Matisse, not to mention the Fauvists, but Braque, Modigliani, among others. I love a good book that tracks the conceptual thread of some historical thing or another. While I would say in the realm of art I favor either the impressionists/post-impressionists or the abstract expressionists both before and after these modernists, but I still, having seen so many of these very famous early 20th century paintings, loved reading about them and doubly appreciated the sociohistorical context.