Hilary Spurling, Whitbread award-winning biographer of Henri Matisse, invites TateShots into her London home. She describes how she came to realise Matisse was not just a painter who had a profound influence on the art of the second half of the 20th century, but was also ‘an extraordinary human being’ who ‘sacrificed absolutely everything for his art’.
Hilary Spurling on Matisse
'For all of the painters I knew when I was young, Matisse was a god'
We Recommend
Françoise Gilot on Matisse
'Matisse was my god,' says the lover and muse of his good friend and rival, Pablo Picasso.
Caragh Thuring: Studio visit
The artist talks about her new paintings and the representation of space in two dimensions
Luc Tuymans: Studio visit
We visited Tuymans in his home city of Antwerp in Belgium
Wilhelm Sasnal: 'Artists have to be active as citizens'
Mass media images, snapshots of friends and banal town views are among the starting points for Sasnal's paintings.
Find Out More
Artist
Henri Matisse
1869–1954
Artwork
The Inattentive Reader
Henri Matisse
1919
Artwork
Draped Nude
Henri Matisse
1936
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint or other media to a surface, usually with a brush
Collage
Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface