Fauve painting: the making of cultural politics

Art historian Herbert (U. of Southern Calif.) rigorously examines a handful of Fauve paintings, which leads him to a broad-ranging investigation of a great number of related contemporary artifacts including polemical political tracts and contentious art-critical writings, tourist postcards and photographs of nudes, travel guidebooks, and ethnographic treatises. He shows how the paintings of Matisse and others engaged many pressing issues of the day and simultaneously camouflaged that engagement, and he discusses the sources and implications of that phenomenon. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.