He took a small bite of the chromium-yellow marzipan bear, chewed with pleasure. “Each color in its own way is a stick of dynamite. And my models ….” He bit the bear in two. (Cut paper by #Henri Matisse, 1947. Lines from #THE WOMAN WHO BROUGHT MATISSE BACK FROM THE DEAD)
ON what would have been her 105th birthday — February 15th — remembering #MIEP GIES who risked her life for over two years to help to hide and care for #Anne Frank and her family while in hiding and saved Anne’s diary after the arrest. Blessed to be her friend for over 25 years as well as her collaborator on #ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED, here’s Miep with my birds Fanny and Puccini during a visit.
Like Matisse, Lydia Delectorskya, thought to be Matisse’s mistress, had a bad feeling about Claude’s prolonged stay in America. Shouldn’t she have returned to France by now?
[see The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead by Alison Leslie Gold]
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.
As death stalked Matisse, France fell. There were days and weeks of continuous rain. Why was Paule Boule (who was to become THE WOMAN WHO BROUGHT MATISSE BACK FROM THE DEAD) crammed into the back of an open truck with two dozen others passing a swollen river near to St. Genis Lavel?
