In her third addition to the Meet the Artist! series (Alexander Calder; Pablo Picasso), Patricia Geis demonstrates how Henri Matisse (1869–1954) transformed his days in a sick bed to his birth (and rebirth) as an artist.
Matisse studied to be a lawyer in Paris and started at "a very proper law firm," when, at 21, an attack of appendicitis rendered him bedridden. His mother's gift of a paint set sent him down a different path. Well-chosen examples of Matisse's early work, such as Still Life with Books and Candle (1890), depict the photographic clarity with which he painted, and his dramatic departure is seen in paintings such as The Dinner Table (1897). These reproductions appear as paginated thought balloons from a child at the center of a two-page spread. The design occasionally feels awkward, but the balloons succeed in grouping related paintings and tracing the artist's evolution, and the interactive elements will engage children.
Geis also points out how Matisse's artwork reflected the changes in the world around him. Salmons, magenta and teals dominate his 1905 Open Window, Collioure, painted at the dawning of his Fauvism period; nine years later, his French Window at Collioure evokes a black cave, the shutters leading into the fearful unknown, painted at the start of World War I. The second illness that confined him to bed resulted in his famous cut-paper compositions (gouaches découpées), and the "window that opens" to his La Gerbe (1953) neatly brings readers full circle to its image seen through the book's die-cut front cover. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness