Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds. One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.
Spurling is a veteran English theatre and literary critic and a biographer of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The fact that she is an amateur in art matters proves to be an advantage, given that she is also unfailingly sensitive and thoroughly informed. Matisse’s greatness resides in capacities of the eye and the mind that almost anyone, with willingness, can discern, and no one, with whatever training, can really comprehend. I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play. Matisse did not. His art reserved nothing for himself. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.
“The Unknown Matisse” told of an awkward youth from a dismal region of northern France—he was born in the cottage of his maternal grandmother, in 1869, and was raised in Bohain, an industrial textile center. He was an unhappy law clerk when, in 1889, he began to study drawing and, while laid up with appendicitis, was given a set of paints by his mother. The effect was seismic. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” How much did he mean that? He meant it to the extent of warning his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Amélie assented. She “had spent much of her life searching for a cause in which she could put her faith,” Spurling writes. Her parents were ruined in a spectacular scandal, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Spurling attributes to Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace a cocooning “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. (If there is any reason to doubt aspects of this book, it’s the unprecedented coöperation that the author coaxed from the congenitally overprotective heirs.) Amélie and, later, Marguerite—a daughter Matisse had fathered with a shopgirl in 1894 and raised with Amélie—were strong-willed confederates of Matisse in his work, and severe critics when his concentration flagged, managing a virtual family firm of which the artist was both the fragile chairman and the slave-driven labor force. According to Spurling, “The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential.” Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an “annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings.” The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.
Matisse was not taught to paint; he just started doing it. His first two canvases, from 1890, are essentially consummate Old Master-ish still-lifes, the first one pretty good and the second, featuring opulent reds, a knockout. (Of the second painting, Spurling writes, “Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on painting.” Twenty years later he had the same reaction to it, only stronger.) He had style before he had craft, which he picked up along the way by copying paintings in the Louvre and taking classes with, among others, the arch-academician Adolphe-William Bouguereau and the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. (His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true.) Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy, but each strives for an integral vision. Matisse was thirty-one years old when he began showing in Paris—in 1901, a year after Picasso, eleven years younger, arrived in town from Barcelona. (They met in April of 1906, at the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein.) It was in 1905, in the Mediterranean town of Collioure, that Matisse, in close collaboration with André Derain, combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism—a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.
“Matisse the Master” opens in 1909, with the Matisse family—which now included, in addition to Marguerite, two sons, Jean and Pierre—living in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” a fractured fantasia that seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse, was regularly exciting near-riots of derision in the public. (“My Arcadia,” Matisse called the picture, which established his career’s dizzying keynote: calm intensity or, perhaps, intense calm.) His huge-hipped, sinuous “Blue Nude,” of 1907, discomfited even Picasso, who complained, “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.” As usual, Picasso (then creating “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his own monumental riposte to “Le Bonheur de Vivre”) was onto something: pattern was a decisive element in Matisse’s kind of picture, which applied a passion for decorated fabrics that began in his childhood. But Picasso was loath to admit that the combined effects of ornamental rhythm and blooming flesh constituted a revolutionary correlative, and not a contradiction.
Picasso and Matisse are poles apart aesthetically. Matisse told his students, “One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away.” Picasso’s line has no desire; it is sheer will. Form builds in Picasso, flows in Matisse. Picasso uses color. Colors enter the world through Matisse like harmonies through Mozart. Young artists and intellectuals in Paris at that time overwhelmingly favored Picasso’s analytical rigor, to the extent of attacking Matisse in print and snubbing him in public. Gertrude Stein (unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Stein, Matisse’s first major collector) enjoyed ridiculing him, “reporting with satisfaction,” Spurling says, “that her French cook served M. Matisse fried eggs for dinner instead of an omelette because, as a Frenchman, he would understand that it showed less respect.” Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. His temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”
Matisse himself precipitated the most significant and indelible controversy of his career. In 1908, in a famous text, “Notes of a Painter,” he stated as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” At the end of “The Unknown Matisse,” Spurling writes that the metaphor “has done him more harm ever since than any other image he might have chosen.” Straining to defend it, she hazards that “this passage reflects its obverse—Matisse’s intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation, rejection and exposure—which could be neutralised only by the serene power and stable weight of art.” This tack strikes me as unnecessary, on two counts. First, in general, the principle of Matisse’s armchair seems ever sounder in comparison to more stirring but ultimately vain programs of modern art. If “modernism” had any effective purpose beyond acclimating cultivated people to rapid worldly change, it was a bust. Second, in particular, the tired businessman whom Matisse most likely had in mind was no Babbitt but almost a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works, the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, who wrote to him in 1910, “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” “Dance II” (1910) and “Music” (1910), heraldic mural-size slabs of resonating minor-key red, green, and blue, fulfilled commissions for Shchukin’s house in Moscow, which by 1914 contained thirty-seven Matisses—“He always picked the best,” the artist said—in history’s first dedicated museum of modern art. (Lenin expropriated the collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums.)
Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Her talent is as apparent as her emulation of him, in a charming 1911 portrait, that shows him reclining on a checkered bedspread, reading a book with amused eyes. Spurling writes, “She personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models.” She also epitomized a period type of “self-reliant single girl,” an obsessive subject for Matisse in those years, which Spurling locates between the earlier heroines of Henry James and the later solitaries of Jean Rhys. Matisse’s 1911 portrait of Meerson shows a primly dressed and posed, tremblingly sensitive woman slashed with “two fierce black arcs—plunging from neck to thigh, and from armpit to buttock,” which resist any explanation aside from their sheerly formal éclat. Spurling loses me when she hesitates to concede a sexual relationship. The body language in two group photographs from 1911 testifies that Amélie scented the worst. (In one, nearly everyone faces the camera except Meerson, who stares at Amélie, and Amélie, who carefully gazes at nothing.) A combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s peremptory neediness caused a severely rattled Matisse to end the connection, with a maximum of bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929.
But the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but of the artist’s growing will to stand, however precariously, on his own. A climax came in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the “Portrait of Madame Matisse,” a thunderous painting, in drenching blues and greens, of a chic and stony woman leaning forward in a chair, with a black-featured gray mask of a face. (“Saturday with Matisse,” a friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!”) Spurling says that the portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting, but in this case it was compounded by something like exorcism. The portrait expresses no specific feeling but, rather, registers innumerable emotions, not excluding tenderness. The game tilt of Amélie’s small head, sporting a dainty ostrich-feather toque, could break your heart. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.”
One well believes Spurling that life with Matisse could be “close to unendurable,” but enduring it had been Amélie’s vocation, through years of impoverished existence in studio-centered homes. What eroded her role was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a big suburban house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909, and from which Matisse was increasingly absent. (In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti, where his melancholic character drew comment from a new friend, the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau: “Shadows are rare here. There’s sunshine everywhere except on you.”) Matisse continued to depend on Amélie, just not enough. Sulkily, she ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. The couple finally split in 1939, when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia who, having been hired as Amélie’s companion, increasingly served the ailing master as model, assistant, and nurse. Delectorskaya reacted to being banished (among other sorrows, which included a thwarted ambition to study medicine) by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol, to remarkably slight effect. Soon the artist and his wife were legally separated and Delectorskaya was back. Phlegmatic in the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.”
Spurling, in her preface to “Matisse the Master,” announces an intention to demolish “two standard assumptions, both false.” The first, which is, indeed, common, concerns “the supposedly exploitative relationship” that Matisse had with the women he painted. The second, which was bruited in 1992 by an American art historian, Michèle C. Cone, in a book on artists in Vichy France, is less often heard, and involves, according to Spurling, “baseless but damaging allegations about Matisse’s behavior in World War II.” In answer to the first charge, Spurling—backed by access to Matisse’s immense correspondence, among other previously withheld archives—contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his keen feelings for many. In this, Spurling is up against a climate of cynical received opinion. I’m one of numerous critics on record as being certain, based on no evidence, that Matisse womanized during his decades in Nice, which started with seasonal sojourns in 1917, when he lived in hotel rooms painting naked or harem-garbed models who, Spurling writes, “were drawn from the tide of human flotsam washed up in Nice between the wars.” Matisse never disavowed, in principle, the libertarian anarchism of most of his avant-garde generation. Nor did he seem to share the wintry belief of Piet Mondrian, quoted by Spurling, that “a drop of sperm spilt is a masterpiece lost.” He would visit brothels, though apparently without enthusiasm. (“Not much fun,” he said.) But I discover ready support for Spurling’s arguments in my own experience of the Nice odalisques, who loll on chairs or chaises amid flowers, fruits, and sumptuous fabrics. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Such is the character of Matisse’s formal radicalism, early and late: distributed energy, suspended gesture, deferred climax. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd.
Spurling associates the Vichy charge with a “popular image of the painter indulging himself among the fleshpots of Nice in wartime,” which is absurd on its face. During the war, Matisse was isolated in Nice and Vence. He was old and ill with cardiovascular, renal, and abdominal disorders; he underwent a colostomy in 1941 and, a year later, almost died. Cone bases a speculation that Matisse “sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime” on a mild complaint by the artist, back in 1924, that people were mistaking, as French, the cosmopolitan art scene in Paris. (“French painters are not cosmopolites,” he told a Danish interviewer—an observation, largely accurate, about the Parisian avant-garde of the twenties.) Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement. It’s true that he shielded his art from politics under all circumstances—he created the reverberant domestic idyll “The Piano Lesson” (my favorite twentieth-century painting) in the summer of 1916, while death swaggered at Verdun. But there seems to be no gainsaying his at least passive solidarity with the Resistance, which swept up the two most important women in his life—Amélie, who was a typist for the Communist underground, and Marguerite, who served as a courier—as well as his son Jean, who was involved in sabotage operations. (Pierre had by that time become an art dealer in New York.) Amélie was jailed for six months; Marguerite was tortured by the Gestapo but escaped from a cattle car that was stalled on its way to a prison camp in Germany during the war’s chaotic waning months. The artist’s loyalty to the poet and leading Communist Louis Aragon, who, while on the run, spent time with Matisse and wrote passionately about him, also weighs in his favor.
Matisse was so consumed by aesthetic sensibility that his responses to life, when not baffled and distraught, were like unwitting prose poems. Asked to recommend a possible mate for Jean, he sized up one young woman as “tall, well made, limbs a bit long—sprawling movements like a young dog—intelligent, very gifted and very reserved.” His habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day in Nice, in 1917, Spurling tells us, he “rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.” Spurling knows her man so well that you readily tolerate her occasional reading of his mind: “By the seventeenth it was so hot he stayed indoors all day, drawing fruit, reading or dozing on the studio couch, feeling his feet swell and thinking about his ‘Still Life with Green Sideboard.’ ” (As anyone might: that quiet painting, from 1928, is one of the most uncannily ambiguous ever made; you cannot decide if you are looking at or into the surface of a cabinet door.) He had warm but awkward dealings with his sons, realizing late in life that he had burdened them with the sort of hectoring pressures to meet his standards that he had suffered from his own father. Pierre said of the boy in “The Piano Lesson,” “Yes, it was me, and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons.” The one person who could command Matisse’s attention was Marguerite. She had married a brilliant man of letters, Georges Duthuit, who was Matisse’s best critic in his lifetime; when Duthuit proved unfaithful to her, the artist forbade him to write about his work. Matisse is never so affecting as in his account of the two weeks that Marguerite spent with him after her escape in 1945: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.”
Matisse spoke with self-knowledge both sad and ruthless—on behalf of driven artists in general—when, in a 1941 letter to Pierre, he referred to a harrowing recent painting by his friend Georges Rouault: “A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artists’ products—as one might enjoy cows’ milk—but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.”
The last decade and a half of Matisse’s life, spent mostly as an invalid, was a bonus gift of time—“a second life,” he called it—in which, deciding that he had gone as far as he could with oil painting, he invented and developed a new kind of art. His compositions of paper cutouts included the 1947 book “Jazz,” and designs for Catholic vestments to go with his total design of a convent chapel in Vence—an improbable, gruelling commission, including seventeen stained-glass windows and several nearly abstract murals, that was arranged with help from a favorite former model, who had become a nun, and an idealistic young monk who came to remark, “I feel less and less Gothic, and more and more Matisse.” The project horrified not only much of the Catholic hierarchy but also a contemporary art world then largely in thrall to Communism. (Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. Actually, he proposed a fruit-and-vegetable market, to which Matisse “was proud of snapping back that his greens were greener and his oranges more orange than any actual fruit.”) But such was Matisse’s prestige, with the added advantage that the artist largely financed the project himself, that the chapel opened in 1951 in a ceremony led by the Archbishop of Nice. At first bewildered by the chapel, the sisters of the convent came to love its chaste serenity and effulgent color. “From now on,” Spurling writes, “indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: ‘It means modern.’ ”
Matisse’s cutouts realized a brilliant conjunction of drawing and color which had always been implicit in his art—often, as if his lines were not the container of his color but the edge produced by its expansion, like the contour of wetness left by a wave on a beach. Formed with scissors, color and shape become effectively one. In his house, luxuriant with simple amenities and living things, he “exercised dominion . . . from his bed,” Spurling writes. “Models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises.” Picasso, accompanied by his lover, Françoise Gilot, was a frequent and welcome visitor. While still fencing with each other like old duellists, they talked art. (Gilot remembered one occasion when Matisse, producing American catalogues of the work of Pollock and Robert Motherwell, asked Picasso, “What do you think they have incorporated from us? And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?”) Matisse died at the age of eighty-four, on November 3, 1954, with Marguerite and Delectorskaya at his side. Spurling reports that Delectorskaya “left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years.”
If Spurling fails to make one important element sufficiently clear, it’s the connection between the peculiarities of Matisse’s life and his singularity, which is also his absolute modernity, as an artist. The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern. You can track his inspirations, seeing, for example, that his discovery of Russian icons, during a visit to Shchukin in Moscow in 1911, informed a large confrontational painting of him and Amélie, “The Conversation” (1911). But how does this marital anecdote (the great man in pajamas!) manage to impress as an all-time symbol of creativity? Matisse couldn’t say, and no one else can, either. The circumstances of his life and time, as detailed in this appropriately capacious biography, continually distill into drops of wonder. ♦
