Word: henry
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Back at the White House, Harry Truman barely had time to wash up a bit before playing host to a royal visitor: Belgium's Regent Charles-Theodore-Henri-Antoine Meinrad, Count of Flanders. Prince Charles arrived amid a din of sirens. He wore the khaki uniform of a major general, was accompanied by Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak. A tall young man with a penchant for playing ping-pong, he looked rather bored...
...lifework of Henri Matisse, or as much of it as the Philadelphia Museum of Art could lay hands on: almost 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints. The work told more than all the books on the subject put together, and more than Matisse himself could possibly have explained. The aging master, who doesn't get around much any more, stayed far away, in his villa just outside the little Riviera hill town of Vence, making more pictures...
...stuff exploded. Matisse's paintings had been put in the same room with those of other crazy young men: Rouault, Dufy, Derain and Vlaminck. Almost everyone who peeked into that room came away reeling with outrage. The new painters were just fauves, they decided-wild beasts-and Henri Matisse the wildest...
...Matisse, to give the final twist. A painting, they decided, is a painting first and foremost, and whatever it represents must be secondary. Granted that much, they felt perfectly justified in making their own rules, regardless of "appearances." Some (the nonobjective painters) chose to ignore nature altogether, but Henri Matisse never went that...
Like Icarus, Matisse has flown close to the sun; his most recent pictures are so richly dazzling that beside them such bold 19th Century colorists as Renoir and Van Gogh fade to dimness. And like Icarus, Henri Matisse has not much time. Sitting up in bed, the old man puts importunate visitors off with a serene apology: "I'm very busy," he murmurs, "packing my bags for the next world...