BiographyAmazingly, Henri Matisse, who died in 1954, had no biography until recently. The publication of the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography covers the last 45 years of the artist's life and work, and is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Matisse.
Matisse emerges as a strong family man, whose family life however did not really survive the pressures of his creative drive. His daughter Marguerite, taken on as her own daughter by Matisse's wife, Amélie, is one of the most impressive characters to emerge in this volume. The couple's two sons, Jean and Pierre, seem to have found their disciplinarian father oppressive. But Matisse's letters to Pierre, who fled to America following a disastrous marriage to a beautiful Corsican, reveal a great depth of communication. Indeed the fact that Matisse set aside an hour or so each day to write letters, many of which have survived, greatly helped the author. Amélie Matisse was deeply involved with her husband's work and utterly devoted to him for more than 30 years. Every place the family ever lived became primarily a studio; the living room, even the bedroom, with silence essential for the artist's work. She did not stick the pace and a rancorous separation in 1939 left the artist increasingly isolated from his family. The reader is discouraged from seeing Matisse as an artist who may have engaged in carnal relations with his models.
Major collectors of Matisse included perhaps no one as discerning as Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a textile manufacturer from Moscow, who bought 27 paintings in six years, and more later. The Russian had an unerring knack of picking out the latest break-through canvas and carrying it off. Shchukin commissioned the famous 8½ft x 12ft Music (1910) and Dance (1910), which can be seen with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon as launch pads for Modernism. Most of Matisse's contemporaries saw these utopian decorative panels as bestial, primitive and barbaric. The material and moral support offered by Shchukin transformed the Matisse family life before the first World War. Shchukin owned several works of biographical importance. These included a large group portrait of the Matisse family and an elegant, mainly blue, portrait of Amélie, which had required 100 sittings and made her weep to look at. He also owned The Conversation, an unusually psychological work infused with domestic tension as Amélie confronts Henri, who wears the pyjamas in which he liked to paint.
On Matisse's visit to Russia he was not upset that his great patron had covered over the genitals of a musician in Music. This trip intensified his interest in the expressive power of the decorative arts and his shift from perceiving the western classical past as paradigmatic. Spurling identifies Shchukin's palace as the first permanent gallery of modern art. Problematically for Matisse, it was not accessible after 1914.
The biography reveals his lukewarm relations with his dealers, Bernheim-Jeune, and the extent to which Matisse's work provoked angry critical response in France. In 1936, he was the only major French artist not offered a commission by the state in preparation for an international exhibition.
He believed in strict observation and fidelity to the artist's primary response or first emotion. Matisse felt that after the invention of photography external reality was absorbed and re-shaped by the imagination of the artist. The artist condensed and synthesised, eliminating detail in attempts to penetrate rather than reproduce reality. Matisse sought an art which had balance and purity and would be restful. The serenity he sought and achieved in his art reflected neither his own temperament nor the period he lived in. Spurling brilliantly evokes his life during both World Wars. He was 44 in 1914 and was hurt at being rejected for service. Twice he tried to get the verdict reversed. Ironically, Marguerite felt her life was saved by this war; the medical advances made during it led to a successful operation on the weak windpipe that made her family fear for her life. During the second World War she, like Jean, who served at the end of the first, joined the Resistance. She was interrogated by the Gestapo and suffered dreadfully.
THE ACCOUNT OF the glorious chapel at Vence ends this biography beautifully. During the war Matisse's assistant, Lydia, whose indispensable role in his life may have been a catalyst in the matrimonial separation, thought it safer to move Matisse from Cimiez to Vence. By 1945, state approval was manifested in the purchase of seven paintings for the new museum of modern art. In Vence, in 1947, a former model who was now a Dominican novice showed Matisse her watercolour design for the stained-glass window of the garage the nuns were going to convert into a chapel. Matisse, who had done very little easel painting from 1930 to 1935 or during the war, became very excited at the prospect of a major decorative project. By December 1947 he and Brother Rayssiguier had designed a whole new chapel. Matisse overruled a proposal that Le Corbusier would help with the architecture. He found an architect who would do as he said. Despite fragile health, Matisse headed off to Paris, where Fr Couturier became an essential ally in the project and later modelled for St Dominic in the chapel. The aging artist had a "taxi-bed" prepared so that he could paint the white ceramic wall-tiles in black. The 17 stained-glass windows were designed several times by Matisse before being deemed satisfactory. The studio in Cimiez was re-opened to accommodate the work. When the chapel was consecrated in 1951 it was not immediately admired. Giacometti was one of the few major contemporary artists who unreservedly valued it. Picasso liked parts of it. Now it stands as one of the great works of the 20th century.
Spurling's even-toned biography strikes a good balance between the narrative of the life and an understanding of the work. She contextualises excellently. While relations with other artists and details of the travel which "cleansed the eye" are well presented, she does not overwhelm with detail. In this, her valuable work has the edge on the great biographical work on Picasso done by John Richardson.
Vera Ryan teaches art history at the Crawford College of Art in Cork. Volume two of her book, Movers and Shapers in Irish Art, 1960 to Present, is due out at the end of the year
Matisse: The Master - A Life of Henri Matisse. Volume Two, The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 By Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 512pp. £25