The Arts

Matisse and His Jewish Patrons

By Catherine C. Bock-Weiss | Summer 2012

THE STEINS COLLECT: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE
edited by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 492 pp., $75

COLLECTING MATISSE AND MODERN MASTERS: THE CONE SISTERS OF BALTIMORE
by Karen Levitov
The Jewish Museum of New York and Yale University Press, 80 pp., $112

Only four still life paintings by Henri Matisse include books with legible titles. The most surprising of them anchors the objects in The Philadelphia Museum's large "Still Life: Histoires Juives." Histoires Juives is a volume in the Gallimard series Les Documents Bleus. The book's editor, Raymond Geiger, described it as a collection of "stories with a moral, and narratives that belong to that treasure of popular Jewish folklore transmitted by oral tradition." This might be a bit high-flown for the contents, which consisted of Yiddish jokes in French translation. For instance:

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About The Author

Catherine C. Bock-Weiss is professor emerita at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and the author, most recently, of Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the Grain (Penn State University Press).