Author: Robert Hughes

Cited by

• Justin Cartwright (1)
  • IN: Other People's Money (2011) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: Matisse's studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse's work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, sealed away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem 'L'Invitation au Voyage': Furniture gleaming with the sheen of years would grace our bedroom; the rarest flowers, mingling their aromas with faint gusts of amber, the painted ceilings, the fathomless mirrors, Eastern splendour. ... all would speak, in secret, to our souls, in its native language... There, everything is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure...
    FROM: The Shock of the New, (1936), NULL, Australia