"une fête en cimmérie" rare vintage matisse book

Published by Nice musée Matisse et reunion de musée nationaux. Printed in 2003.

Marguerite, Matisse's daughter and her husband Georges Duthuit, art critic, historian and writer, planned in 1947 to put together a series of books on the theme of party rituals in certain civilizations, such as that of the Eskimos, Indians , Polynesians and Africans. Inaugurating the series, the book on the Eskimos is a poetic essay by Georges Duthuit, Une Fête en Cimmérie for which Matisse produced the illustrations of Eskimo faces. During this period, Matisse worked on the project for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, devoting himself to numerous studies in connection with which he wondered about the representation or not of faces because of the spirituality they must inspire. It was also at this time that he began to draw the faces of Eskimos, a people in permanent contact with the mystical and physical forces of Nature.

31 lithographs of different formats were produced between 1947 and 1948 but the work was published in 1963, 9 years after Matisse's death. Throughout his work, the representation of the human face will be a subject that will force Matisse to develop his research. The face that evolves into a mask, a representative sign of the essence of a personality, is a way to deepen the questions of expression, gaze, resemblance and reality. On the occasion of the presentation of the Eskimo faces, the different ways in which Matisse envisions the representation of the human is thus declined.

dimensions: 9.5"W x 11.5"H x .25"D