ST. LOUIS — Are you near a window? Try looking out. Henri Matisse used to look out windows a lot. He saw colors. Hilary Spurling, in her great Matisse biography, reported that the French artist once ...

Matisse’s friends were dying in the trenches when he met a new model. “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” wrote the poet Robert Browning. “The honest thief, the tender murderer, the ...

His pictures alone seemed to suggest it, especially the paintings of semi-clad women in harem-like settings that Matisse made in Nice in the 1920s. Then there were the streams of beautiful young women ...

LONDON - Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her biography Matisse the Master, defeating four other authors. The Oxford-educated author claimed the $43,000 prize during a ...