H Hamilton £25 pp512
Henri Matisse cared little for property. In the course of his matchless career, he only owned one home, situated in an unexciting Parisian suburb. It soon dwindled in importance to a summer residence, while his need for new subjects and fresh stimulus obliged his wife and children to hole up with him in an unending chain of rented studios, apartments and middling hotels. Towards the end of his life, this international star could be found living in Villa le R êve, in Vence — so small and box-like that, when Picasso and his mistress Françoise Gilot visited, they initially walked past it and knocked at the door of a more attractive dwelling further up the street.
There are such surprises throughout Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse, of which this is the second and final volume. Her first volume, The Unknown Matisse, was justly titled, given his struggle against parental disapproval, financial insecurity and public mockery, but Spurling identified causes of misery that were wholly new. Amid humiliations, anxiety and grinding poverty, Matisse forged a desire for “an art of balance, purity and tranquillity, free from any nagging or disturbing element”.
It remained his ambition. In Matisse the Master, he lives through two world wars, endures professional setbacks and family tribulations, constant tension and much frustration; he travels widely and at one point returns after an operation from the brink of death. A number of experiences leave him feeling “demolished”, yet, in his pursuit of calm, he continues to throw off paintings of consummate lucidity. They convey a serenity and stability which, as Spurling remarks, life could not give. It is an intensely moving tale.
Every day, Matisse set aside an hour or more to write letters to family and friends. Only a small portion of these has been published. Spurling, an expert at mustering biographical evidence, draws on this source material to gripping effect. Her account activates small details, such as the physical constraints that undermine creativity, as well as key relationships, including Matisse’s involvement with important collectors.
Among these was Sergei Shchukin, a textile manufacturer who carried off to Russia the greatest Matisse collection ever made, including the murals Music and Dance. In order to come to terms with these huge canvases and their radical simplicity, Shchukin shut himself away alone with them for several weeks. They then took their magisterial place in his palatial house, amid pale silk furnishings, rococo plasterwork and liveried doormen. A few years later, he added another five Matisses to his collection, hanging them in a dining-room that already contained 16 Gauguins. According to the Mos- cow critic, Jacob Tugenhold, Matisse’s stained-glass colours made the Gauguins seem like “matt fresco”: “Matisse’s palette is richer, more complex and grander than Gauguin’s. Matisse is the greatest colourist of our time, and the most cultivated: he has absorbed into himself all the luxury of the East and of Byzantium.”
The problem was that few in France saw Matisse this way. “I work entirely for America, England and Russia,” he said of the pre-1914 period, for in Paris he had been sidelined by the widespread interest in cubism. At the same time, he was deeply enmeshed in family life, with the outcome that his wife and three children began to share his embattled state. A family industry evolved to protect, promote and manage his output. But, as Spurling slowly reveals, “the ruthless demands of art closed in on Matisse in his middle years, dehumanising him and all who shared his life”. Only a family as close as this could inflict such pain on each other. And despite the great love he felt for his wife, Amélie, Matisse, as he turned 70, found himself obliged to accept a formal separation. “I paint to forget everything else,” he one said. Elsewhere, he averred: “There’s nothing to be done but to live in and for yourself — to work towards becoming a real force that can’t be dismissed.”
It was assumed that Lydia Delectorskaya, who took over the responsibility for running his life, was his mistress. This seems unlikely. One of the myths about Matisse, for which Spurling finds no evidence, is that he was a womaniser, his models as available to him as they appear to be in his pictures to the viewer. Long spells in the 1920s were spent at Nice, where he painted nudes, their sexy poses given harem connotations by the addition of oriental screens, clothes or patterned cloths. When Odalisque in Red Culottes was bought by the French state in 1922, the art enthusiast Marcel Sembat wrote in disgust to the painter Paul Signac: “He’s given in, he’s calmed down, the public is on his side.” Later, in 1931, a Paris exhibition, in which these nudes figured, stamped Matisse in the public mind as facile, indulgent and, in relation to Picasso, the lightweight of the two.
Spurling’s monumental biography challenges that view. It deepens and makes more complex our understanding of Matisse. We glimpse the depths of frustration that underlay his exuberant, carefree imagery. We are invited to agree with Louis Aragon, that the magic, happiness and splendour in Matisse’s art does not imply ignorance of the world’s darkness and horror. Matisse was “demolished” when, in 1945, he sat listening to his daughter’s detailed description of being tortured to the point of death by the Gestapo. But he went on to stage-manage the clarity, serenity and stillness that you encounter today in the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence. “The point is,” explained this unbeliever, “to create a special atmosphere: to sublimate, to lift people out of their everyday concerns and preoccupations.” But perhaps his best advocate was his colleague, the painter Jules Flandrin, who said: “The essential thing about Matisse’s painting is not to judge it with the eye. You have to look at it as you would look at the sunshine through the window. And then it works, I promise.”
OBJECTS OF DESIRE
Matisse’s relationship with his models, may have been more chaste than often thought, but he did talk in strikingly sexual terms about his involvement with them. It was, he said, a sort of imaginative “flirtation which ends by turning into a rape. Whose rape? A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in the face of a sympathetic object”.
Hilary Spurling will talk about Matisse at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday, April 13. Full festival details are on www.sundaytimes.oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk, or telephone 01865 423342 for a programme. Matisse the Master is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
