"...to devote my life to the essential thing-- the thing for which I am made and which can bring a little happiness to the great family, the greatest spiritual family."--Matisse to André Rouveyre, September 4, 1942Of all the artists of this century, Henri Matisse is one of the greatest and most beloved. His influence on modern art, both during his lifetime and today, has never stopped growing; in the eyes of the world, he is the French painter par excellence.Henri Matisse is all the more cherished because his work celebrates the positive aspects of life, as evidenced by the titles of many of his major paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupté, La Joie de Vivre, La Danse, Musique, to mention but a few. His explosions and juxtapositions of color and pattern inspire pure delight in the beholder, and his mastery of line, volume, and form are perhaps unequaled in the art of our time. The vitality, energy, and life-enhancing qualities that radiate from his art represent distillation of all that is affirmative in the human condition and are given immortality through that rare and indefinable quality known as genius.The art of Matisse describes a trajectory leading from realism to abstraction, from darkness to light, from the cold of the north to the heat of the south, a route marked off by such revolutionary innovations as the burst of color found in Fauvism or the invention of his cut-outs. Matisse was still creating at a time in his life when many artists are content to rest on their laurels.Since its original publication in 1984, this book by Pierre Schneider stands alone as the bible on the art of Matisse. The author spent fourteen years amassing a prodigious amount of information on the artist, and includes his own personal and original views on the work. Including over nine hundred illustrations, this is the most substantial reference of the works of Matisse ever published.The reader will discover Matisse watercolorist, draftsman, ceramist, and the architect-- and unquestionably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Henri Matisse,: A novel

Aragon

HarperCollins Distribution Services

Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, “a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. André Breton wrote of this work: “no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .”

Paris Peasant

Picador

The Libertine

Literature & Fiction

ARAGON, Louis

Dramas & Plays

Riverrun Pr

Published in 1922 and modeled on Fénelon's seventeenth-century epic of the same name, Aragon's work parodies its heroic models, didacticism, psychological stability, and descriptive and narrative balance.

The Adventures of Telemachus (French Modernist Library) (English and French Edition)

Humor & Entertainment

Hubert, Renee Riese

Hubert, Judd David

Humor

Univ of Nebraska Pr

Surprising juxtapositions like goats spread across pianos and fearful optical illusions like eyeballs being sliced characterized the surrealistic movement in the arts in 1928 when Louis Aragon published Traité du Style in Paris. Aragon had become ever more contemptuous of vogues and pretensions. In the name of surrealism, he produced the first significant critique of it. Instead of merely upsetting old relationships and skewering sensibilities, Traité du Style was meant to shock with a capital S, and it did. Only now has it been completely translated into English. Although time has attenuated the scandalous nature of Aragon's language, his criticism has lost none of its edge in this translation by Alyson Waters.
From the beginning, which describes a postcard showing a little boy on a potty as representative of French humor and the French spirit, to the end, an attack in scatalogical language on the French military establishment, Aragon zeros in on one target after another. Nothing escapes his notice or venom—whether it is the masturbatory output of contemporary writers, the prostitution of culture, or the perversions of government.
Still, Treatise on Style is more than a brilliant diatribe directed against what Aragon perceived as the moral, political, and intellectual failures of his time. He proposes surrealism, in art as in life, as a means to achieve a valid ethical and aesthetic "style." Surrealism, as Aragon defines it here, loses some of its mythical and mystical trappings; it becomes inspiration with rolled-up shirt-sleeves. He exercises this faculty in his own writing, which aims to shake readers out of their complacency by alternating the intensely lyrical with the borderline obscene and juxtaposing the language of the educated elite with that of the street. Whether denouncing religious fantacism or dispensing praise, Aragon remains true to his idea of the surrealist project: to reclassify certain values through the act of writing itself. Treatise on Style entertains as a portrait of a movement and of a personality who kept moving.

Treatise on Style/Traite Du Style (French Modernist Library)

Waters, Alyson

History & Criticism

University Of Nebraska Press

Originally clandestinely published in 1929 in Brussels in an edition of 215 copies and intended for private distribution, most copies were seized by customs at the French border. This is the first edition translated into English. With four sexually explicit images by Man Ray. Poems by Benjamin Peret and Aragon; edited by Andre Breton, though uncredited. 54 pages; 4 b&amp;w plates; 7 x 8.75 inches. Text in English. From an edition limited to 215 copies.

1929

Benjamin Péret

MAN, RAY

Alyscamps Press

Aragon : Oeuvres romanesques complètes, tome 1 [May 02, 1997] Aragon, Louis (French Edition)

Genre Fiction

French and European Publications Inc

Le Creve-Coeur: Le Nouveau Creve-Coeur (French Edition)

Aragon, L.

Literary

Gallimard]

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Books by Aragon