Word: colorful
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...illustrations of Tocqueville, the people he met, and the scenery he witnessed on his journey, contributing to the authentic, accessible feel of the book. In addition, the intimate details of Tocqueville’s life—from his loss of faith to his sexual adventures—add color, humor, and warmth to the image of the social scientist...
...light and shadow, form and space, are distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black, white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers, structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish...
...most dauntless of the Fauves - the Wild Beasts - a small group of painters who pushed the telegraphic brushwork of Impressionism and the dissonant palette of post-Impressionism into fever territory. At their head was Matisse, King of the Beasts, building pictures out of colliding zones of pyrotechnic color or from staccato dashes of magenta and ultramarine...
Even in his portraits, like The Italian Woman, Matisse could almost entirely transform the sitter, because he was confident that feeling in a painting was conveyed not by physical appearance or facial expression but by the sum of the impressions created by line and color. Often he began a picture with something like a realistic scene, then distilled it repeatedly. This is what happened with his magnificent Bathers by a River. When he started the large wall painting in 1909, it was a panorama of voluptuous women in bright colors. When he finished it seven years later, the women were...
...Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his work over the next three decades he would return - you might say retreat - to more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments. Color-field paintings, for example - the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler - would emerge directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him too quickly after...