Henri Matisse: Jazz

Rating:
Summary: Good, but could have been better.
Review: First, the good news. The book itself is beautifully printed. Pages are heavy stock - I've seen flimsier business cards. Color is rich, and only one page had any registration problem that I could see. This is more than just a monograph about the artist, it reproduces a book by the artist (and I'm grateful for the English translation). I have a passion for primary sources - Matisse isn't among my favorite artists, but I'll listen when an undeniable master speaks.

Unfortunately, two major features of the book interfere with my full enjoyment of it. First, the original Jazz interleaved images with text in Matisse's own hand. A little of the hand-written text has been reproduced, but certainly not all of it. The original relationship of text and image has been lost. Second, and related, is that the translation appears in the back of the book. It's only a minor nuisance to flip back and forth between the book's real content and back matter. I had real problems, though, with the fact that the back matter gives the whole of Matisse's text, but the main content does not. The translated part gives no indication of what it provides that the reproduction doesn't, so it was a "Where's Waldo" exercise, trying to resynchronize my reading with viewing of the images. Perhaps economic decisions about printing forced the omissions. I can still wish that different tradeoffs had been used in the choice, or that the book's organization could have compensated better for the losses.

A final point, and a relatively minor one, is that Matisse provided a visual index or table of contents, showing a thumbnail sketch of each work in the book. I was fascinated by Matisse's own view of what mattered in each composition. The way it's reproduced looks a bit like a ransom note, however. Each annotation has been cut out into its own little box and laid out according to the book designer's idea of proper organization. Perhaps there is good reason for this; maybe the thumbnails would have been illegibly small if the page were reproduced to scale. Still, I would have liked to see the original page's organization, even if the reproduction also showed the sketches at readable size.

Despite the book's flaws, it seems to be an adequate presentation of a coherent body of compositions. Warts and all, I looking forward to enjoying the book over and over.