[Henri Matisse is] a personal meditation by a poet and novelist, whose own place in 20th-century letters has at least minor distinction, on an artist whom he admired from youth, then finally met, to establish a rather formal friendship, dialogue and collaboration. The result is this marriage of a series of texts composed over a period of 27 years with a profusion of images, constituting what Aragon prefers to call a novel, with Matisse evidently the protagonist.

The book can be seen as belonging to a long and more or less glorious French tradition: the Meeting of the Poet and the Painter…. To append oneself to this tradition is not without its dangers, and Aragon's effort is inevitably marked by a certain pretentiousness. This is in part a product of the excessive nonchalance of the form: an assemblage of several different fragments written on different occasions …, interspersed with more...