«I WANT TO BE MATISSE»

Matisse was leading a movement of artists dubbed Les Fauves —“the Wild Beasts”— but he didn’t look the part of a radical. A Frenchman from the north, he wore three-piece suits and had a trimmed reddish beard. His friends called him “the professor.” “Tell the American people that I am a normal man,” he told the New York Times in 1912, “that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, etc., just like any man.”

-Salon
 August 17 2014