One day, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) cut a small bird out of a piece of white paper. It was a simple shape, but he liked the way it looked and didn't want to throw it away, so he pinned it to the wall of his room. But the bird looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it, and before he knew it, he had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens filled with brightly coloured plants and animals and shapes of all sizes. Featuring colourful cut-paper illustrations and Matisse's own cut-outs, Matisse's Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist's never-ending curiosity and continuous process of trying new things helped turn a small experiment into a radical new form of art. Children will see how Matisse used nothing but paper and scissors to create simple shapes like squares, leaves and birds, and experimented with scraps of leftover paper and new colour combinations to create lush gardens on his studio walls.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aWell organized, tightly written and full of interesting and provocative information. The authors produced a very good piece of scholarship that is theoretically grounded and attentive to detail, especially concerning methodological issues including the potential limitations of their study.a
--Victoria Basolo, University of California, Irvine

aThis well written book makes a major contribution to urban sociology and race/ethnic studies.a--"Choice"

a[W]ill be fascinating for policy makers and scholars concerned with housing patterns and racial discrimination.a
--"Jewish Book World"

"An excellent and timely volume, very well written, clearly organized, and cogently argued."
--Douglas S. Massey, author of "Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration"

"The Housing Divide brilliantly transforms the Big Apple into a crystal ball for glimpsing the racial and ethnic future of 21st century America. The core finding--that, just as in the past, racial discrimination keeps Americans with African ancestry from taking advantage of opportunities used by the newest immigrants and their children to get ahead--portends a troubling future in which American society may cleave between blacks and non-blacks. This book is a wake-up call to America to finally address racial discrimination in housing."
--Richard Alba, co-author of "Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration"

"The Housing Divide takes a hard look at housing and neighborhood quality in the nation's largest and most diverse city. It exposes longstanding features that are found in most American cities, including the potential for upward mobility by some immigrant newcomers, the traps that others fall into, and the continuing reality of racial discrimination that limits progress for too many New Yorkers."
&3151;John R. Logan, editor of "The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform"

The Housing Divide examines the generational patterns in New York City's housing market and neighborhoods along the lines of race and ethnicity. The book provides an in-depth analysis of many immigrant groups in New York, especially providing an understanding of the opportunities and discriminatory practices at work from one generation to the next. Through a careful read of such factors as home ownership, housing quality, and neighborhood rates of crime, welfare enrollment, teenage pregnancy, and educational achievement, Emily Rosenbaum and Samantha Friedman provide a detailed portrait of neighborhood life and socio-economic status for the immigrants of New York.

The book paints an important, if disturbing, picture. The authors argue that not only are Blacks--regardless of generation--disadvantaged relative to members of other racial/ethnic groups in their ability to obtain housing in high-quality neighborhoods, but that housing and neighborhood conditions actually decline over generations. Rosenbaum and Friedman's findings suggest that the future of racial inequality in this country will increasingly isolate Blacks from all other groups. In other words, the "color line" may be shifting from a line separating Blacks from Whites to one separating Blacks from all non-Blacks.

Published in conjunction with the second major exhibition The Museum of Modern Art is organizing for the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Van Gogh to Richter: People, Places and Things is an exploration of the myriad innovative ways modern artists have reinvented the traditional genres of portrait, still life and landscape from the 1880s to today. By looking closely at works in a range of media, the catalogue shows how these long-established categories have expanded and transformed from Post-Impressionism to Photorealism, reflecting changes in our conceptions of individuals, objects and spaces. The selection of works range from Frida Kahlo's confident selfrepresentation to Gerhard Richter's blurred likeness; from Paul Cezanne's iconic tabletop arrangements to Jeff Koons's commodified objects; from Vincent van Gogh's roiling olive trees to Richard Long's land art, each demonstrating how modernism's radical new forms have continuously revitalized art history's conventional subjects. An introductory text reflects on how these artists both inherit and reject the traditions of their adopted genres, and three essays provide close readings of a key portrait (Henri de Toulouse Lautrec's La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge), still-life (Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl and Oranges), and landscape (Van Gogh's The Olive Trees) from the dawn of modernism, and expand to consider subsequent works.

Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to Henri Matisse's paper cut-outs, made from the early 1940s until the artist's death in 1954, this publication presents approximately 150 works in a groundbreaking reassessment of Matisse's colorful and innovative final chapter. The result of research conducted on two fronts--conservation and curatorial--the catalogue offers a reconsideration of the cut-outs by exploring a host of technical and conceptual issues: the artist's methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice; their economy of means and exploitation of decorative strategies; their environmental aspects; and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and ultimately made permanent, a transformation accomplished via mounting and framing. Richly illustrated to present the cut-outs in all of their vibrancy and luminosity, the book includes an introduction and a conservation essay that consider the cut-outs from new theoretical and technical perspectives, and five thematic essays, each focusing on a different moment in the development of the cut-out practice, that provide a chronicle of this radical medium's unfolding, and period photographs that show the works in process in Matisse's studio.
One of modern art's towering figures, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. From the clashing hues of his Fauvist works made in the South of France in 1904-05, to the harmonies of his Nice interiors from the 1920s, to this brilliant final chapter, Matisse followed a career-long path that he described as "construction by means of color."