In The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, award-winning author of Anne Frank Remembered and The Devil’s Mistress, Alison Leslie Gold presents the life of nun-cum-artist’s model Claude Boule.
Inspired by a true story and told in spare, evocative prose, this improbable, color-soaked life arc spans the art of Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol, a convent in 1930s Nice, wartime Lyon, postwar Paris, New York in the dazzling 60s on to millennium’s end.
The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead explores the abstruse relationship between artist and model: Who transfixes whom?
The incidental, often travail-filled, life of Claude Boule – impenetrable and inscrutable – serves as a poignant foil for intimate views into the creative processes and behind-the-scenes life of one of the 20th century’s most momentous artists.
The brash assemblage of The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead also encompasses diverse uncelebrated but no less vividly tinctured people whose lives were touched – erotically, devoutly, unscrupulously and in other often unpredictable ways – by the model’s.
The author is beaming us back into a hippie world and conjuring up all the fervent emotions and illusions of flower power, the life style of the Andy Warhol generation devoted to love, not war. Contemporaries Matisse and Andy Warhol gave the movement the respectability that made it appealing to the educated. For the last time Alison Gold rekindles for us the fire of youth that is dying down with her memory of bygone times.
Thanks for taking the time to comment on THE WOMAN WHO BROUGHT MATISSE BACK FROM THE DEAD. Of course you get it, from your toes and even under your fingernails. You are the dream reader for a writer; someone who cares about books and has insight and instincts. With appreciation, Alison.