Murray’s Reviews > In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art > Status Update

His plates showed models in motion - leaning over, turning aside, conversing - against stylishly minimalist backgrounds. This was a new vision of women, quite different from the ramrod-straight models posed in ornate settings cluttered with plants, screens and art nouveau furniture which had characterized the fashion plates of earlier years.

Modernist art was not just about paintings 🖼️

I’m unable to put this book down. It reads like a novel. Romance, tragedy, heroism. These women and men are determined to be artists even if the sales and money are not there (think Van Gogh). Picasso is in his Blue Period (painting what the public saw as depressing works though I love The Old Guitarist) followed by his upbeat Rose Period (la grâce des femmes). Neither him nor Matisse can get shows or sell art.

Fascinating. I love reading about the lives of artists - whether they be musicians, painters, writers, dancers, theatrical 🎭 so long as the focus is on their art and the significant relationships in their lives (not gossipy). This book is alive with paint and and exploring new ways to create and bring the mundane (as some see it) to color and to life.

For Vlaminck, subjective expression was not so much an aesthetic as a personal compulsion, a private quest driven by a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely pure. ‘I was poor, but I knew that life was something pure, and I realized that all I wanted to do was to find some new and profound way of identifying myself with the soil.'

🖼️ 🎨

I waited for this in the mail which is a vibe you cannot get from an ebook 🙌🏼

🔆(ebooks have different vibes)

Fun to find a book in an envelope at the door🚪📖 💕 ahhh the scent ! and the rich touch on the fingertips of paper 📄