"Picasso & Matisse. Manet & Degas. Pollack & de Kooning. Lucian Freud & Francis Bacon. This is the story of four pairs of artists -- each linked by friendship and a spirit of competitiveness. Taken together, they form an impressive lineage stretching across more than 150 years. But in each case, these relationships had a flashpoint, a damaging psychological event that seemed to mark both an end and a new beginning, a break that led onto new creative...

It is hard to believe today that Matisse was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life. Fifty years after...

An artful journey of discovery in the search for true identity and truth. Born into a famous family of artists, Pierre Matisse grew up immersed in the artistic life of Paris and the French Riviera, spending time with some of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. The man he knew as his grandfather, legendary artist Henri Matisse, gave him his first painting lesson and a strong desire to become...

Presents the life and work of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century French artist Henri Matisse, imagining his art-inspired childhood and growth into becoming one of the most admired artists in the world.