Henri Matisse

FLASHBACK

He looks like Sigmund Freud's reclusive Uncle Fritz, not the man they branded a wild beast. Fauve, however, was the label the French critics first stuck on Matisse's exuberantly colored Post-Impressionist work. Indeed, the pasha of paint did leave his family in Paris for the southern comforts of Nice. But the bourgeois hotel bedrooms and lounging odalisques he painted there for fifteen years have a sort of joyful domesticity. His paradise was a cozy one, dressed up in Pierrot-style harem pants, far from the exotic/erotic dangers of Gauguin's Tahiti. Now, as the National Gallery of Art's recent exhibition showed, he's increasingly popular. And Matisse: Rhythm and Line (Clarkson N. Potter), a sumptuous anthology of paintings and drawings selected by maverick museum curators Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, can only help.