Matisse the Master

Reviewer Patrick McCaughey
June 11, 2005
Matisse's The Dance, a 1910 oil on canvas, hanging at the Hermitage 
in St Petersburg.

Matisse's The Dance, a 1910 oil on canvas, hanging at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Matisse the Master: A life of Henri Matisse
By Hilary Spurling
Hamish Hamilton, $69.95

Seven years ago Hilary Spurling published the first instalment of this biography, boldly calling it The Unknown Matisse. How could an artist so familiar, so ploughed over by critics and curators, possibly be unknown?

In chapter after chapter Spurling revealed how little we knew of one of the two greatest 20th century artists. The grim, stifling northern background, the extreme tension under which he worked accompanied as often as not by sickness and insomnia, the desperate penury, these turned out to be the seedbed from which the brilliant flowering of Fauvism sprang.

They were the years when the paintbrush felt "like a stick of dynamite" as his friend and fellow Fauve, Andre Derain said.

Spurling's second volume begins with the artist at 40 on the brink of his most radical and creative decade. If you read the standard literature on Matisse, you encounter nothing but art historical triumphalism. The master moves from the grand decorations of the teens through the exotic but slightly wobbly Nice years of the '20s, recovers steadily through the '30s and early '40s and ends in the luminous blaze of the Vence chapel and the big cut outs. "Never such innocence again."

As relentlessly as the first volume, Spurling maps a life of pain and desperation, embattled from within and from without, whose only cure lay in the grinding toil of the studio.

From 1909 onwards Matisse was largely freed from the anihilating poverty of his early years. He signed a contract with the leading Parisian art dealer Bernheim Jeune, who agreed to purchase everything he produced on a sliding scale according to size. Moreover it was the era of the patron and the committed collector. Gertrude and Leo Stein were the first and when they dropped Matisse in favour of Picasso, Michael Stein, their nicer younger brother, and his adventurous wife, Sarah, took up the slack.

Most spectacularly of all was Sergei Shchukin, the fabulously wealthy Russian textile manufacturer who bought virtually all the best and most radical works from 1909 to 1914. The 47 paintings Shchukin once owned have passed to the Hermitage and the Pushkin thus oddly fulfilling the collector's long-term goal of creating a modern museum with Matisse as its cornerstone.

Yet even as he enjoyed his newfound good fortune, Matisse was vilified and derided. When Bernheim Jeune mounted his first retrospective exhibition in 1910, "the critics responded with dismissive brutality" and "the attacks came from all quarters. The young and progressive were as splenetic as the elderly and conservative". Matisse was described as a syphilitic by one while another wrote most nastily of all "he paints like a nigger and talks like a Magus".

It set the pattern.

A few months later the Paris audience jeered and catcalled the Dance and Music, his largest, grandest, fiercest decorations for Shchukin when they were displayed at the autumn Salon. In London in 1946, the English stood on chairs and shook their furled umbrellas at a joint exhibition of Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Vatican issued a strong rebuke after the consecration of the Chapel of the Rosary Vence, France, in 1952. The Dominican nuns, to their enduring credit after initial doubts, defended their chapel against all comers.

The critical censure and public abuse were all the harder to take because of the intense, even debilitating struggle Matisse underwent in the studio. Nothing in Spurling's long and detailed biography surprises more than her picture of Matisse at work. Lydia Delectorskaya, his model, studio manager, general factotum, vital to Matisse's very existence for the last 20 years of his life, observed "the incredible stress" before he started drawing and "the extreme tension" he endured while working.

Spurling interestingly argues that he needed the presence of models "to humanise the ordeal of painting". So much of Matisse's work from the 1920s onwards appears to be the spontaneous response to the figure or the setting, the changing light in the studio or the concord and dissonance of colours that it comes as a shock to learn of the Sturm und Drang that created it.

"The storm takes place in my work," he once remarked and frequently recorded his rage and frustration over a painting or project. Yet this unending struggle was his lifeline, his sole path to self-knowledge "to give yourself completely to what you're doing while simultaneously watching yourself do it - that's the hardest of all for those who work by instinct".

Through nearly 900 pages of the two volumes, Spurling weaves the complicated web of Matisse's relations with his family. They depended on him. He needed them. He warned his wife, Amelie, when he married her: "I love you dearly but I shall always love painting more." His three children lived "in fear of offending their implacable, inaccessible, inscrutable Papa". He, in turn, "was exasperated by their incompetence and wounded by their callous indifference". Neither charge was true.

For all his self-absorption - "the hermit of the Promenade des Anglais", he once called himself - Matisse knew that his work was "the rudder of the family".

His art was the central reality of all their lives, their source of dignity, even identity, when marriages, health, careers all failed. Matisse's commitment to his art was absolute and the tensions that it generated sustain and fuel this long and gripping biography.
