Among art-historical reference books, Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts ca.1450–1700 is one of the most famous and successful. Some 150 volumes have been published: seventy-two between 1948 and 2007 in the original series covering printmakers in alphabetical order and, from 1993, seventy-nine in the so-called New Hollstein series devoted to individual printmakers, designers and print publishers. 

The exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, recently at Tate Modern, London (closed 7th September), and opening later this month at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (12th October to 8th February), is a triumph for its organisers, who have gathered together a comprehensive collection of these extremely fragile works, including enormous murals that normally never leave their permanent homes.1 Following a broadly chronological path, the installation at Tate Modern, where this reviewer saw the exhibition, was at once enlightening and imaginative, grounded in the well-documented history of the development of Matisse’s unique gouache découpée technique but exciting in its twists and turns and changes of rhythm.