Author Christopher C. Gorham discusses his latest book and takes your questions.

In May 1940, as Parisians fled the advancing German Army, Henri Matisse was returning to the French capital. Sick, elderly and stunned by the success of the blitzkrieg, the world-famous artist was compelled to safeguard forty years of artwork. From Paris he returned to his adopted home, the ancient port of Nice on the Mediterranean, where he passed the terrible years of war and occupation. To leave France, he felt, would be a betrayal. 

Hitler, seeking cultural as well as territorial conquest, had decreed avant-gardism to be “an enemy of the state.” The failed watercolorist-turned-dictator exalted traditionalism over contemporary art, taught Germans to jeer at surrealist, expressionist, and Dadaist works, and to equate artists like Matisse and Picasso with cultural disintegration. Considered “degenerate art,” many Matisse artworks would be removed from galleries and museums and hidden in storage rooms—or worse, stolen by the Nazis.  

Matisse at War is a vivid portrayal of the advancement of fascism and war into French life and culture during World War II through the lens of one of the country’s most celebrated post-impressionists and his family. 

Books will be available for sale and signing.