Matisse in the Barnes Foundation

"Despite the reknown of the Matisse holdings at the Barnes Foundation, these works have long remained uncatalogued and elusive to many, given the Foundation's restrictions on loans and color photography. Generations of scholars have lamented the black-and-white slides of Le Bonheur de vivre that anticlimactically accompanied lectures on the riot of Fauvre color. Matisse in the Barnes Foundation [...] grew out research on the collection initiated in the 1990s [...]. Goals for the Matisse project included gathering comprehensive information on the works, from external sources, the tremendously rich and recently catalogued Barnes Foundation Archives, and the insights of curators and conservators, and creating for each work an internally consistent record in the Foundation's database, part of which could eventually migrate to the Foundation's website"--Foreword (pages 21-22).