Henri Matisse

It would be difficult to think of any subject in the history of modern art as immediately appealing as the colourful, painterly, uplifting and often joyous interiors of Henri Matisse.

Yet in the vast literature on this much-celebrated artist, this is the first book to show the full significance of the window in Matisse's thinking about interior and exterior space. Throughout his career Matisse studied and rearranged his rooms as persistently as Rembrandt studied his face and changed his costume. When he lived in hotels and small apartments his living quarters usually doubled as his studio. In a continuous engagement with these spaces he produced not only singular masterpieces but also developed a theme as rich as the traditional landscape or portrait. In each new phase of his art and with every change of residence, Matisse reinvented the theme of the window.

The distinguished art historian Shirley Neilsen Blum analyses more than fifty paintings, starting with the early Studio Under the Eves (1903), a traditional darkened room with a small brilliant window, through Harmony in Red (1908), with its startling use of colour, pattern and line, to the more abstract work created during the First World War such as The Piano Lesson (1916). After the war Matisse moved to Nice. Tall French windows that open upon a balcony and overlook the Mediterranean define many of the paintings from these years. By the late 1940s the window is so bound to the structure of the flattened space that it is barely differentiated from a painting or piece of tapestry hanging on the wall. The book culminates in one of Matisse's greatest and most original works - the Chapel of the Rosary (1947-51) at Vence - where, instead of imitating light and colour in paint, he manipulated actual light through the coloured glass of the windows.

Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, a book to be savoured, enjoyed and returned to time and time again for its insights, reveals not only the key role of the windowed interior in Matisse's oeuvre but also how the artist's work paved the way for some of the most radical abstract painting of the twentieth century.

Shirley Neilsen Blum has had a long and distinguished career as an art historian. She taught for many years, including periods at the University of Chicago, the University of California at Riverside and the State University of New York at Purchase. Her early interest was in Northern Renaissance art and she is well known for her book Early Netherlandish Triptychs, but Professor Blum has also curated exhibitions and written about modern art, including co-authoring the exhibition catalogue The Window in Twentieth Century Art. She now lives in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.