Matisse the Master

A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.

Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.

If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.
  • WINNER | 2005
    L.A. Times book Prize (Biography)
  • WINNER | 2005
    Whitbread Book of the Year
1909: Paris, Cassis and Cavalière

Returning from Berlin to Paris in January 1909, Henri Matisse got off the train partway to visit one of his few German supporters. He had just said good-bye to his majestic Harmony in Red, leaving it behind in a gallery in Berlin, where people said his latest paintings were senseless, shameless, infantile monstrosities or sick and dangerous messages from a madhouse. The French felt much the same. Harmony—the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other—was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries.

His host at Hagen, a few miles along the Ruhr from Essen, was the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had already bought five works from Matisse and was about to commission a sixth. Osthaus insisted on showing off his latest acquisition, a mosaic design installed in a modern crematorium newly built on an industrial waste site. When they entered the building on a cold, grey, rainy Sunday afternoon they found an organ playing softly in the gloom and a coffin sinking into the ground in front of them. Tired, depressed and deeply shaken by what had happened in Berlin, Matisse lost his usual composure and let out a scream: “My God, a dead body!”

Osthaus explained that the body was a fake, part of a public relations exercise put on to counter the local workers’ instinctive mistrust of cremation. But Matisse could not forget it, and often marvelled afterwards at the strange way Germans chose to amuse them on a Sunday afternoon. He had a second shock when he got home and received a parcel from Germany containing what looked like a gigantic funeral wreath. In fact, it was a wreath of bays posted by a young American admirer, Thomas Whittemore of Tufts College, to console Matisse for the failure of his Berlin show. Trying to lighten her husband’s nervous tension, Mme Matisse tasted a bay leaf (“Think how good it will be in soup”), and said brightly that the wreath’s red bow would make a hair ribbon for their fourteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite. “But I’m not dead yet,” Matisse said grimly.

The work Matisse stopped off to see in Hagen was his own Nymph and Satyr. It was a relatively conventional set of three ceramic panels showing a stocky muscular nymph doing a stamping dance, then falling asleep and being tentatively approached by a hairy, hopeful satyr enclosed in a frieze of grapes and vine leaves. In January 1909, Matisse had recently completed an oil painting of the same subject (colour fig. 1). This time the satyr (who had been more of a tame faun on Osthaus’s glazed tiles) started out with a little beard and pointy ears, but turned into something far more violent and raw. Matisse’s final version is unequivocally human: a clumsy, graceless, lustful male advancing purposefully on a naked female huddled with her back turned at his feet. The man’s pink, thinly painted flesh is outlined in red, the colour of arousal. So is the woman’s, but every line of her expressive body—bent head, drooping breasts, collapsing limbs—suggests exhaustion, helpless weakness and enforced surrender.

This is the mood of Paul Cézanne’s The Abduction (or The Rape), where another masterful naked man carries off another pale, limp, fleshy female. The fierce erotic charge in both paintings is reinforced by harsh colour and rough handling. In Matisse’s case, the texture of the paint was itself an outrage. The choppy stabbing brushstrokes, the landscape’s crude contours filled with flat scrubby green, the blurry patches round the man’s head, crotch, left hand and right knee, all convey extreme disturbance. His picture, like Cézanne’s, is both personal and symbolic. Both suggest an image spurting up from some deep, probably unconscious level of the imagination on a tide of bitterness and rage. Matisse’s satyr looks as if he means to strangle his victim with his outsize red hands. Matisse himself said that this was how he always felt before he began a painting.

For him each painting was a rape. “Whose rape?” he asked, startling his questioner (perhaps also himself) with the brutal image that surfaced in his mind during an interview that took place more than three decades after he painted Nymph and Satyr: “A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic object.” He seems to have meant that he relied on his female models to arouse feelings that he could convert to fuel the work in hand. He confronted whatever underlay that process head on in Nymph and Satyr. The displaced emotion here is at least in part aesthetic. The last time Matisse put classical nymphs into a picture was in 1904 in Luxe, calme ET volupté, an uneasy experimental composition that led directly to the explosive canvases dismissed by most people the year after as the work of a wild beast, or Fauve. In the winter of 1908–9, Matisse was once again grappling with, and violating, the ancient canons of a debased classical tradition in a canvas that commits pictorial and depicts sexual rape.

This coarse, powerful, primitive painting was earmarked for the Russian collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a man in process of committing himself as unreservedly as Matisse to liberating painting from the academic tyranny of Beaux-Arts aesthetics. Shchukin was an inordinately successful textile manufacturer with a patchy education and no academic training. People dismissed him, in both Paris and Moscow, as gullible and uncouth, an ignorant boyar who made no attempt to cultivate the refinement that enabled other Moscow merchants to build up more serious art collections. It was Shchukin who had commissioned the Harmony in Red currently hanging in Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin. Shchukin came to see it there and, unlike the German art world, was powerfully impressed. On 9 January he followed Matisse to Paris to inspect work in hand in the studio, including the Nymph and Satyr.

Shchukin took delivery of six Matisse paintings in the month after he got back to Moscow. The painter said that in some ways he came to dread the visits of this particular collector because of his unerring knack for picking out the latest breakthrough canvas and carrying it off, sometimes with the paint still wet. Shchukin grasped at once that Nymph and Satyr was an affront to decency and morals, which only increased his impatience to possess it. This new canvas could not easily be displayed in mixed company, let alone in public. It was quite different from the sexy pictures other men kept behind locked doors in their private rooms and cabinets. Its secret kick for a subversive like Shchukin was precisely that it violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons.

The contemporary French incarnation of those precepts in the eyes of fashionable Moscow was Maurice Denis. Shchukin himself owned several pictures by Denis, who had once embodied the last word in sophistication for him, too. In January 1909, Denis was making waves in Moscow. He had come to install his latest work in the home of another Moscow merchant, Ivan Abramovich Morozov (who had also made a fortune out of textiles). Morozov, who was Shchukin’s close friend and only Russian rival in the field of modern art, had ordered seven huge painted panels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche for his music room.

Denis pictured Cupid as a plump, life-size, naked youth wearing wings to match his predominant colour scheme of pink, green and blue. His Psyche is a solid girl with cushiony breasts, buttocks and hips. The couple’s sturdy build adds to the absurdity of their chaste embrace as they dangle cheek to cheek in midair with nothing touching below the waist. The décor of Cupid’s palace with its garden ornaments, mauve silk drapes and floral sprays is more reminiscent of an expensive modern florist than of ancient Greece. This is seduction with any hint of desire or danger airbrushed out. It went down well on its first showing at the Paris Autumn Salon, and it made an even bigger splash in Moscow. So much so that Morozov, who was thinking of hiring Matisse to decorate his dining room, dropped the idea in favour of commissioning six more panels from Denis.

It was Shchukin instead who commissioned wall paintings from Matisse. The painter never forgot the lunch at the Restaurant Larue in Paris where the pair of them together hatched a plan to end all blue-pink-and-green decorative schemes peopled with dancing nymphs and piping fauns. Matisse’s Dance and Music grew from their conversation at this lunch. “I hope that when they see your decorations, the tumult of admiring cries to be heard at present will die down a little,” Shchukin wrote in May, describing the fuss over Denis’s Psyche. “At present they talk of it as a great masterpiece. They laugh at me a little, but I always say, ‘He who laughs last, laughs best.’ I trust you always.”

Nymph and Satyr, one of the starting points for the new scheme, was finished, crated up and posted off to Moscow in early February. By this time, Matisse had left Paris for the Mediterranean coast. He planned to spend a month at the little Hotel Cendrillon in Cassis, replenishing the stocks of energy depleted by the gloom and strain of a Parisian winter. Walking along the steeply shelving shore at Cassis and in the chestnut woods on the cliff top, he studied air, water, light, sun glinting on spray, waves pounding on rocks as he had done further along the coast at Collioure four years earlier. “There is . . . a cove near Cassis,” wrote Marcel Sembat, who spent a day with Matisse in early March, “where the green of the open sea on the horizon brings out the deep blues and foamy whites of the tide trapped between cliffs, which you can see jostling and throwing up little blade-like crests in the full sun.”

Movement preoccupied the painter in the run-up to the Dance. Sembat was struck by the intensity and accuracy of Matisse’s response to the violent swirling currents, “the clash of creative contrasts we talked about together.” Sembat, seven years older than Matisse, married to a painter and himself a passionate art enthusiast, was an exceptionally acute and attentive witness. By his own account he was living out a dream that day in Cassis, having brought with him one of his lifelong heroes, the great reforming architect of the Third Republic, Jean Jaurès. The Socialist leader and his two companions walked and talked beside the sea, delighted with one another, with the brilliant spring sunshine, and with the infectious visual excitement emanating from Matisse at the end of his month in the country. They rounded off their morning over lunch at the hospitable little village inn. Sembat wrote the day up in his diary and returned to it again a decade later, leaving no doubt that, for him at least, there was something magical about this unlikely encounter between two great French stars, one rising fast, the other soon due to set forever.

Sembat’s writings provide some of the sharpest and most lucid testimony to Matisse’s progress in the decade leading up to the First World War. The two first met, probably, through Georgette Agutte, Sembat’s wife, who had belonged loosely to the same little knot of painters as Matisse in their student days. But they had an even earlier point of contact through Matisse’s wife, Amélie, whose father, Armand Parayre, knew Sembat from the start of his career. As a newly elected Socialist deputy writing leaders for Parayre’s radical campaigning newspaper, Sembat had belonged to the generation of up-and-coming Republican politicians who, unlike many of their elders, managed to leap clear of the sensational Humbert scandal which all but destroyed Matisse’s in-laws in 1902. Parayre himself survived public ignominy, imprisonment and a dramatic trial with the help of his young son-in-law (this was the first if not the last time Matisse had reason to be thankful for the brief training as a lawyer forced on him by his own father).

Amélie Matisse emerged, like her father, apparently unscathed from her family’s terrifying ordeal. (Her mother, who never got over it, died prematurely in 1908.) But the affair left Amélie with a deep-seated horror of any kind of exposure, and a lasting suspicion of the outside world. It reinforced her self-reliance, her stubborn pride and her almost reckless indifference to what other people thought. Beneath the demure and unassertive manner that was all she showed to those who didn’t know her, Amélie was, by the standards of her class and age, profoundly unconventional. Her marriage had been a gamble in which money, security, and social advantage played no part. She became her husband’s eager partner in a high-risk enterprise neither ever truly doubted would one day succeed. She had recognised what was in him at sight, and backed her instinct unreservedly ever after.

At times, when Matisse found himself disowned not only by the professional art world but by most of his fellow artists too, his wife remained virtually his only backer. Mutual trust was the core of their relationship. “The basis of our happiness . . . was that we built up this confidence quite naturally from the first day,” Amélie wrote long afterwards to Marguerite. “It has been for us the greatest good and the envy of all our friends, it meant we could get through the worst of times.” The two did everything together. Almost from the day they met, they were known as the Inseparables. The four weeks Henri spent in Cassis was probably the longest time they had been parted since their marriage eleven years before. The studio was the centre of their world, and it was her province as much as his. Henri and his painting gave Amélie’s life its shape and meaning. Hardship and privation hardly mattered by comparison; nor did the rising tide of mockery and abuse that accompanied Matisse’s growing fame.

Even the arrival of their children hadn’t greatly changed their way of life. When it came to a choice, work took precedence over child care. Their elder son, Jean, grew up as much at home with his Matisse grandparents in the north of France as with his parents in Paris. The younger boy, Pierre, spent so much time in the south with his Parayre grandfather and Amélie’s only sister, Berthe, that his aunt became his second mother. Amélie herself was closer to the boys’ older half sister, Marguerite (or Margot), who was Henri’s child by an earlier liaison, and who became in some ways a second self to her adoptive mother. It was Marguerite who stayed at home, sharing the life of the studio that meant life itself to the Matisses.

The family dynamics began to shift a little when they finally moved out of Henri’s cramped bachelor flat in a block opposite Notre Dame into a disused convent at 33 boulevard des Invalides on the far side of Montparnasse. Money was still tight.
Reactions to Hilary Spurling’s
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. I, 1869-1908
published autumn 1998 by Knopf (US) & Penguin (UK)

US REVIEWS

‘Hilary Spurling has given us a definitive biography that reads like a detective story. It is an extraordinary and brilliant book . . . extraordinary in revealing . . . so much about Matisse that was previously unknown and unexpected . . . brilliant in the clarity and compactness of its prose and in the sharpness of the insights that appear on page after page . . . This is a truly indispensable biography . . . vividly drawn, utterly compelling and profoundly moving.’
–John Elderfield, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One can only eagerly await the second volume of Spurling’s definitive biography of Henri Matisse.
–J. Carter Brown, Director of the National Gallery of Art, New York Times Book Review.

Again and again the reader fears for Matisse, as in a good novel: how will he get out of this hole? who will buy his work? what if he gives up? . . . Her second volume cannot arrive too soon.
–Julian Barnes, New York Times Book Review

‘This is a marvellous book–beautifully written, masterly in its research and wonderfully wise in its depiction of character, circumstance and the vicissitudes of the artist’s vocation.’
–Hilton Kremer, Washington Times

‘Spurling brushes aside all our preconceptions about the painter to reveal a personality–and a personal history–none of us had guessed at. . . . This first volume of a full biography of Matisse is a triumph of research and writing, a work of literature worthy of its subject.’
–Richard Dorment, New York Review of Books

The Unknown Matisse is aptly titled . . . Unlike the luckier and more charmed Picasso, Matisse was haunted by the specter of failure, poverty and ridicule, in part because he–again, unlike Picasso–experienced all three. . . . It’s thrilling to learn what Matisse was looking at, what he experimented with, endured and suffered on the way to becoming one of the great painters of our century.’
–Francine Prose, Washington Post

‘Her clear narrative keeps one turning the pages almost as if reading a novel . . . a major accomplishment and sure to be a landmark in the literature on Matisse.’
–Jack Flam, Art News

‘This book is marvellous to read. Having finished it, one wants to start all over again.’
–Svetlana Alpers, Key Reporter

‘An extraordinary new view of Matisse . . . When I first heard that Hilary Spurling was planning to write about Henri Matisse, I wondered what an English literary biographer could possibly tell me about my intensely French artist grandfather . . . The results are absolutely astonishing. For anyone interested in Matisse’s work, this book will be a revelation . . . The book is almost like a mystery story, packed with surprising developments . . . Once started this is a very hard book to put down. I couldn’t recommend it too highly.’
–Paul Matisse, Amazon online

‘A smashing good biography . . . Hilary Spurling’s role is advocate, and she is a formidable one . . . A painter’s development is both an intimate and an open transaction, and Spurling makes us feel its peril.’
–Editors’ Choice, Best Books of 1998, New York Times Book Review

‘Spurling’s book is the opposite of the massive bound collections of file cards that are biography’s current fashion. . . . I do not know of another book which, while lavishly setting its subject among his fellows, illuminates so searchingly the human and artistic struggles of a painter’s life.’
–Richard Eder’s 10 Best Books, Los Angeles Times

"Hilary Spurling has written a rich and deeply illuminating life, with all
the feeling and passion for the work that Henri Matisse himself would have
appreciated. This is a true biographical masterpiece."

-Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday

"A quite glorious biography . . . Hilary Spurling fixes his story with
great humanity and rigorous scholarship . . . She has dug among the
archives and looked very exactly at the pictures, but she doesn't read
backwards from them as though they were somehow inevitable; she sees the
risk and drama in each . . . This is a biography with the tact and timing
of a very good novel."

-Michael Pye, The Scotsman

"Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate
information about Matisse. She has interviewed more people than anyone
else; has combed the public archives more thoroughly; and, most important
of all, has had greater access than any previous researcher to Matisse's
correspondence. This volume is full of previously unknown incidents and
details that correct mistakes and misapprehensions and that clarify or
expand the known record to complete what is, astonishingly, the very first
serious biography of the artist-and destined to remain the standard
biography for a long time."

-John Elderfield, The Guardian

"Superb . . . A reviewer called the first volume of this biography 'a
sunburst.' Now that Spurling's long task is completed, I can only repeat
the compliment: her book is both dazzling and warming."

-Peter Conrad, The Observer

"Inspired and innovative biography . . . What is remarkable about this book
is the way that Spurling enters into the character of her subject,
communicating his charm, his obsessiveness and restlessness, his enjoyment
of life, his vulnerability, the tensions within him, and-hardest of all-his
creativity . . .

"What is particularly impressive is her ability to weave a huge amount of
[primary] material into an easy and, at one level, entertaining narrative,
with her subject's voice as one of many. Her touching account of Matisse's
relationship with the elderly Renoir in the south of France is a good
example of her artistry. Lucid and unhurried as it is, this is a major work
of scholarship, which must transform our view of the artist's work . . .

"The narrative is sustained by her sensitivity and her ability to
convey-often through quotation-the artist's emotions as well as the
physical process of creating the work. The biographer's feeling for the
period creates one of the most pleasurable aspects of the book: its
evocation of life in artistic circles, whether Paris around 1910, St
Petersburg before 1914 or the south of France during the Second World War .
. .

"Matisse is not directly described in this biography; rather, his character
and his creativity are suggested by innumerable touches, as it were, of
paint. Spurling has shown herself a writer worthy of her subject."


-Giles Waterfield, The Independent



UK REVIEWS

‘Outstanding as an interpreter of his art and life alike, she provides fresh illumination on every page. It is a superlative achievement.’
–Richard Cork, The Times
"Spurling's Matisse is an outstanding biography, as full of insight into
the pictures as it is revealing about the man. It is not necessary to have
read the first volume to enjoy the second instalment, though it is certain
that new readers will want to return to his formative years. They will not
be disappointed. "

-Jeanette Winterson, The Times (London)

"I cannot praise Spurling's measured, brilliantly researched and
wonderfully written biography enough."

-Adrian Searle, The Guardian


"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 . . .

"Spurling's monumental biography challenges [the view that Matisse was a
lightweight compared to Picasso]. It deepens and makes more complex our
understanding of Matisse."


-Frances Spalding, The Sunday Times

‘Spurling Volume 1 invites comparison with John Richardson’s Life of Picasso . . . her achievement is in some respects even greater than Richardson’s . . . Hilary Spurling has transformed Matisse studies.’
–William Feaver, Times Educational Supplement

‘A superlative achievement . . . It is a dramatic, moving and sometimes comical story, and all one can hope is that, without relaxing her admirably rigorous standards, Spurling won’t keep us waiting very long for Volume Two.’
–Elizabeth Cowling, Times Literary Supplement

‘Matisse . . . suggests the opposite of the strenuous, discomforting novelty which so much of the art of this century has aimed at embodying . . . It is the purpose of this biography, triumphantly achieved, to reverse that notion in every detail . . . this book transforms our sense not only of Matisse but also of his work.’
–Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph

‘Miraculous . . . the best life of a painter that I have ever read . . . For all the intelligence and sensibility of her approach, Spurling charts [Matisse’s life] with the agonising excitement of great fiction.’
–Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph

About

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.

Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.

If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2005
    L.A. Times book Prize (Biography)
  • WINNER | 2005
    Whitbread Book of the Year

Excerpt

1909: Paris, Cassis and Cavalière

Returning from Berlin to Paris in January 1909, Henri Matisse got off the train partway to visit one of his few German supporters. He had just said good-bye to his majestic Harmony in Red, leaving it behind in a gallery in Berlin, where people said his latest paintings were senseless, shameless, infantile monstrosities or sick and dangerous messages from a madhouse. The French felt much the same. Harmony—the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other—was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries.

His host at Hagen, a few miles along the Ruhr from Essen, was the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had already bought five works from Matisse and was about to commission a sixth. Osthaus insisted on showing off his latest acquisition, a mosaic design installed in a modern crematorium newly built on an industrial waste site. When they entered the building on a cold, grey, rainy Sunday afternoon they found an organ playing softly in the gloom and a coffin sinking into the ground in front of them. Tired, depressed and deeply shaken by what had happened in Berlin, Matisse lost his usual composure and let out a scream: “My God, a dead body!”

Osthaus explained that the body was a fake, part of a public relations exercise put on to counter the local workers’ instinctive mistrust of cremation. But Matisse could not forget it, and often marvelled afterwards at the strange way Germans chose to amuse them on a Sunday afternoon. He had a second shock when he got home and received a parcel from Germany containing what looked like a gigantic funeral wreath. In fact, it was a wreath of bays posted by a young American admirer, Thomas Whittemore of Tufts College, to console Matisse for the failure of his Berlin show. Trying to lighten her husband’s nervous tension, Mme Matisse tasted a bay leaf (“Think how good it will be in soup”), and said brightly that the wreath’s red bow would make a hair ribbon for their fourteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite. “But I’m not dead yet,” Matisse said grimly.

The work Matisse stopped off to see in Hagen was his own Nymph and Satyr. It was a relatively conventional set of three ceramic panels showing a stocky muscular nymph doing a stamping dance, then falling asleep and being tentatively approached by a hairy, hopeful satyr enclosed in a frieze of grapes and vine leaves. In January 1909, Matisse had recently completed an oil painting of the same subject (colour fig. 1). This time the satyr (who had been more of a tame faun on Osthaus’s glazed tiles) started out with a little beard and pointy ears, but turned into something far more violent and raw. Matisse’s final version is unequivocally human: a clumsy, graceless, lustful male advancing purposefully on a naked female huddled with her back turned at his feet. The man’s pink, thinly painted flesh is outlined in red, the colour of arousal. So is the woman’s, but every line of her expressive body—bent head, drooping breasts, collapsing limbs—suggests exhaustion, helpless weakness and enforced surrender.

This is the mood of Paul Cézanne’s The Abduction (or The Rape), where another masterful naked man carries off another pale, limp, fleshy female. The fierce erotic charge in both paintings is reinforced by harsh colour and rough handling. In Matisse’s case, the texture of the paint was itself an outrage. The choppy stabbing brushstrokes, the landscape’s crude contours filled with flat scrubby green, the blurry patches round the man’s head, crotch, left hand and right knee, all convey extreme disturbance. His picture, like Cézanne’s, is both personal and symbolic. Both suggest an image spurting up from some deep, probably unconscious level of the imagination on a tide of bitterness and rage. Matisse’s satyr looks as if he means to strangle his victim with his outsize red hands. Matisse himself said that this was how he always felt before he began a painting.

For him each painting was a rape. “Whose rape?” he asked, startling his questioner (perhaps also himself) with the brutal image that surfaced in his mind during an interview that took place more than three decades after he painted Nymph and Satyr: “A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic object.” He seems to have meant that he relied on his female models to arouse feelings that he could convert to fuel the work in hand. He confronted whatever underlay that process head on in Nymph and Satyr. The displaced emotion here is at least in part aesthetic. The last time Matisse put classical nymphs into a picture was in 1904 in Luxe, calme ET volupté, an uneasy experimental composition that led directly to the explosive canvases dismissed by most people the year after as the work of a wild beast, or Fauve. In the winter of 1908–9, Matisse was once again grappling with, and violating, the ancient canons of a debased classical tradition in a canvas that commits pictorial and depicts sexual rape.

This coarse, powerful, primitive painting was earmarked for the Russian collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a man in process of committing himself as unreservedly as Matisse to liberating painting from the academic tyranny of Beaux-Arts aesthetics. Shchukin was an inordinately successful textile manufacturer with a patchy education and no academic training. People dismissed him, in both Paris and Moscow, as gullible and uncouth, an ignorant boyar who made no attempt to cultivate the refinement that enabled other Moscow merchants to build up more serious art collections. It was Shchukin who had commissioned the Harmony in Red currently hanging in Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin. Shchukin came to see it there and, unlike the German art world, was powerfully impressed. On 9 January he followed Matisse to Paris to inspect work in hand in the studio, including the Nymph and Satyr.

Shchukin took delivery of six Matisse paintings in the month after he got back to Moscow. The painter said that in some ways he came to dread the visits of this particular collector because of his unerring knack for picking out the latest breakthrough canvas and carrying it off, sometimes with the paint still wet. Shchukin grasped at once that Nymph and Satyr was an affront to decency and morals, which only increased his impatience to possess it. This new canvas could not easily be displayed in mixed company, let alone in public. It was quite different from the sexy pictures other men kept behind locked doors in their private rooms and cabinets. Its secret kick for a subversive like Shchukin was precisely that it violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons.

The contemporary French incarnation of those precepts in the eyes of fashionable Moscow was Maurice Denis. Shchukin himself owned several pictures by Denis, who had once embodied the last word in sophistication for him, too. In January 1909, Denis was making waves in Moscow. He had come to install his latest work in the home of another Moscow merchant, Ivan Abramovich Morozov (who had also made a fortune out of textiles). Morozov, who was Shchukin’s close friend and only Russian rival in the field of modern art, had ordered seven huge painted panels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche for his music room.

Denis pictured Cupid as a plump, life-size, naked youth wearing wings to match his predominant colour scheme of pink, green and blue. His Psyche is a solid girl with cushiony breasts, buttocks and hips. The couple’s sturdy build adds to the absurdity of their chaste embrace as they dangle cheek to cheek in midair with nothing touching below the waist. The décor of Cupid’s palace with its garden ornaments, mauve silk drapes and floral sprays is more reminiscent of an expensive modern florist than of ancient Greece. This is seduction with any hint of desire or danger airbrushed out. It went down well on its first showing at the Paris Autumn Salon, and it made an even bigger splash in Moscow. So much so that Morozov, who was thinking of hiring Matisse to decorate his dining room, dropped the idea in favour of commissioning six more panels from Denis.

It was Shchukin instead who commissioned wall paintings from Matisse. The painter never forgot the lunch at the Restaurant Larue in Paris where the pair of them together hatched a plan to end all blue-pink-and-green decorative schemes peopled with dancing nymphs and piping fauns. Matisse’s Dance and Music grew from their conversation at this lunch. “I hope that when they see your decorations, the tumult of admiring cries to be heard at present will die down a little,” Shchukin wrote in May, describing the fuss over Denis’s Psyche. “At present they talk of it as a great masterpiece. They laugh at me a little, but I always say, ‘He who laughs last, laughs best.’ I trust you always.”

Nymph and Satyr, one of the starting points for the new scheme, was finished, crated up and posted off to Moscow in early February. By this time, Matisse had left Paris for the Mediterranean coast. He planned to spend a month at the little Hotel Cendrillon in Cassis, replenishing the stocks of energy depleted by the gloom and strain of a Parisian winter. Walking along the steeply shelving shore at Cassis and in the chestnut woods on the cliff top, he studied air, water, light, sun glinting on spray, waves pounding on rocks as he had done further along the coast at Collioure four years earlier. “There is . . . a cove near Cassis,” wrote Marcel Sembat, who spent a day with Matisse in early March, “where the green of the open sea on the horizon brings out the deep blues and foamy whites of the tide trapped between cliffs, which you can see jostling and throwing up little blade-like crests in the full sun.”

Movement preoccupied the painter in the run-up to the Dance. Sembat was struck by the intensity and accuracy of Matisse’s response to the violent swirling currents, “the clash of creative contrasts we talked about together.” Sembat, seven years older than Matisse, married to a painter and himself a passionate art enthusiast, was an exceptionally acute and attentive witness. By his own account he was living out a dream that day in Cassis, having brought with him one of his lifelong heroes, the great reforming architect of the Third Republic, Jean Jaurès. The Socialist leader and his two companions walked and talked beside the sea, delighted with one another, with the brilliant spring sunshine, and with the infectious visual excitement emanating from Matisse at the end of his month in the country. They rounded off their morning over lunch at the hospitable little village inn. Sembat wrote the day up in his diary and returned to it again a decade later, leaving no doubt that, for him at least, there was something magical about this unlikely encounter between two great French stars, one rising fast, the other soon due to set forever.

Sembat’s writings provide some of the sharpest and most lucid testimony to Matisse’s progress in the decade leading up to the First World War. The two first met, probably, through Georgette Agutte, Sembat’s wife, who had belonged loosely to the same little knot of painters as Matisse in their student days. But they had an even earlier point of contact through Matisse’s wife, Amélie, whose father, Armand Parayre, knew Sembat from the start of his career. As a newly elected Socialist deputy writing leaders for Parayre’s radical campaigning newspaper, Sembat had belonged to the generation of up-and-coming Republican politicians who, unlike many of their elders, managed to leap clear of the sensational Humbert scandal which all but destroyed Matisse’s in-laws in 1902. Parayre himself survived public ignominy, imprisonment and a dramatic trial with the help of his young son-in-law (this was the first if not the last time Matisse had reason to be thankful for the brief training as a lawyer forced on him by his own father).

Amélie Matisse emerged, like her father, apparently unscathed from her family’s terrifying ordeal. (Her mother, who never got over it, died prematurely in 1908.) But the affair left Amélie with a deep-seated horror of any kind of exposure, and a lasting suspicion of the outside world. It reinforced her self-reliance, her stubborn pride and her almost reckless indifference to what other people thought. Beneath the demure and unassertive manner that was all she showed to those who didn’t know her, Amélie was, by the standards of her class and age, profoundly unconventional. Her marriage had been a gamble in which money, security, and social advantage played no part. She became her husband’s eager partner in a high-risk enterprise neither ever truly doubted would one day succeed. She had recognised what was in him at sight, and backed her instinct unreservedly ever after.

At times, when Matisse found himself disowned not only by the professional art world but by most of his fellow artists too, his wife remained virtually his only backer. Mutual trust was the core of their relationship. “The basis of our happiness . . . was that we built up this confidence quite naturally from the first day,” Amélie wrote long afterwards to Marguerite. “It has been for us the greatest good and the envy of all our friends, it meant we could get through the worst of times.” The two did everything together. Almost from the day they met, they were known as the Inseparables. The four weeks Henri spent in Cassis was probably the longest time they had been parted since their marriage eleven years before. The studio was the centre of their world, and it was her province as much as his. Henri and his painting gave Amélie’s life its shape and meaning. Hardship and privation hardly mattered by comparison; nor did the rising tide of mockery and abuse that accompanied Matisse’s growing fame.

Even the arrival of their children hadn’t greatly changed their way of life. When it came to a choice, work took precedence over child care. Their elder son, Jean, grew up as much at home with his Matisse grandparents in the north of France as with his parents in Paris. The younger boy, Pierre, spent so much time in the south with his Parayre grandfather and Amélie’s only sister, Berthe, that his aunt became his second mother. Amélie herself was closer to the boys’ older half sister, Marguerite (or Margot), who was Henri’s child by an earlier liaison, and who became in some ways a second self to her adoptive mother. It was Marguerite who stayed at home, sharing the life of the studio that meant life itself to the Matisses.

The family dynamics began to shift a little when they finally moved out of Henri’s cramped bachelor flat in a block opposite Notre Dame into a disused convent at 33 boulevard des Invalides on the far side of Montparnasse. Money was still tight.

Praise

Reactions to Hilary Spurling’s
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. I, 1869-1908
published autumn 1998 by Knopf (US) & Penguin (UK)

US REVIEWS

‘Hilary Spurling has given us a definitive biography that reads like a detective story. It is an extraordinary and brilliant book . . . extraordinary in revealing . . . so much about Matisse that was previously unknown and unexpected . . . brilliant in the clarity and compactness of its prose and in the sharpness of the insights that appear on page after page . . . This is a truly indispensable biography . . . vividly drawn, utterly compelling and profoundly moving.’
–John Elderfield, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One can only eagerly await the second volume of Spurling’s definitive biography of Henri Matisse.
–J. Carter Brown, Director of the National Gallery of Art, New York Times Book Review.

Again and again the reader fears for Matisse, as in a good novel: how will he get out of this hole? who will buy his work? what if he gives up? . . . Her second volume cannot arrive too soon.
–Julian Barnes, New York Times Book Review

‘This is a marvellous book–beautifully written, masterly in its research and wonderfully wise in its depiction of character, circumstance and the vicissitudes of the artist’s vocation.’
–Hilton Kremer, Washington Times

‘Spurling brushes aside all our preconceptions about the painter to reveal a personality–and a personal history–none of us had guessed at. . . . This first volume of a full biography of Matisse is a triumph of research and writing, a work of literature worthy of its subject.’
–Richard Dorment, New York Review of Books

The Unknown Matisse is aptly titled . . . Unlike the luckier and more charmed Picasso, Matisse was haunted by the specter of failure, poverty and ridicule, in part because he–again, unlike Picasso–experienced all three. . . . It’s thrilling to learn what Matisse was looking at, what he experimented with, endured and suffered on the way to becoming one of the great painters of our century.’
–Francine Prose, Washington Post

‘Her clear narrative keeps one turning the pages almost as if reading a novel . . . a major accomplishment and sure to be a landmark in the literature on Matisse.’
–Jack Flam, Art News

‘This book is marvellous to read. Having finished it, one wants to start all over again.’
–Svetlana Alpers, Key Reporter

‘An extraordinary new view of Matisse . . . When I first heard that Hilary Spurling was planning to write about Henri Matisse, I wondered what an English literary biographer could possibly tell me about my intensely French artist grandfather . . . The results are absolutely astonishing. For anyone interested in Matisse’s work, this book will be a revelation . . . The book is almost like a mystery story, packed with surprising developments . . . Once started this is a very hard book to put down. I couldn’t recommend it too highly.’
–Paul Matisse, Amazon online

‘A smashing good biography . . . Hilary Spurling’s role is advocate, and she is a formidable one . . . A painter’s development is both an intimate and an open transaction, and Spurling makes us feel its peril.’
–Editors’ Choice, Best Books of 1998, New York Times Book Review

‘Spurling’s book is the opposite of the massive bound collections of file cards that are biography’s current fashion. . . . I do not know of another book which, while lavishly setting its subject among his fellows, illuminates so searchingly the human and artistic struggles of a painter’s life.’
–Richard Eder’s 10 Best Books, Los Angeles Times

"Hilary Spurling has written a rich and deeply illuminating life, with all
the feeling and passion for the work that Henri Matisse himself would have
appreciated. This is a true biographical masterpiece."

-Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday

"A quite glorious biography . . . Hilary Spurling fixes his story with
great humanity and rigorous scholarship . . . She has dug among the
archives and looked very exactly at the pictures, but she doesn't read
backwards from them as though they were somehow inevitable; she sees the
risk and drama in each . . . This is a biography with the tact and timing
of a very good novel."

-Michael Pye, The Scotsman

"Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate
information about Matisse. She has interviewed more people than anyone
else; has combed the public archives more thoroughly; and, most important
of all, has had greater access than any previous researcher to Matisse's
correspondence. This volume is full of previously unknown incidents and
details that correct mistakes and misapprehensions and that clarify or
expand the known record to complete what is, astonishingly, the very first
serious biography of the artist-and destined to remain the standard
biography for a long time."

-John Elderfield, The Guardian

"Superb . . . A reviewer called the first volume of this biography 'a
sunburst.' Now that Spurling's long task is completed, I can only repeat
the compliment: her book is both dazzling and warming."

-Peter Conrad, The Observer

"Inspired and innovative biography . . . What is remarkable about this book
is the way that Spurling enters into the character of her subject,
communicating his charm, his obsessiveness and restlessness, his enjoyment
of life, his vulnerability, the tensions within him, and-hardest of all-his
creativity . . .

"What is particularly impressive is her ability to weave a huge amount of
[primary] material into an easy and, at one level, entertaining narrative,
with her subject's voice as one of many. Her touching account of Matisse's
relationship with the elderly Renoir in the south of France is a good
example of her artistry. Lucid and unhurried as it is, this is a major work
of scholarship, which must transform our view of the artist's work . . .

"The narrative is sustained by her sensitivity and her ability to
convey-often through quotation-the artist's emotions as well as the
physical process of creating the work. The biographer's feeling for the
period creates one of the most pleasurable aspects of the book: its
evocation of life in artistic circles, whether Paris around 1910, St
Petersburg before 1914 or the south of France during the Second World War .
. .

"Matisse is not directly described in this biography; rather, his character
and his creativity are suggested by innumerable touches, as it were, of
paint. Spurling has shown herself a writer worthy of her subject."


-Giles Waterfield, The Independent



UK REVIEWS

‘Outstanding as an interpreter of his art and life alike, she provides fresh illumination on every page. It is a superlative achievement.’
–Richard Cork, The Times
"Spurling's Matisse is an outstanding biography, as full of insight into
the pictures as it is revealing about the man. It is not necessary to have
read the first volume to enjoy the second instalment, though it is certain
that new readers will want to return to his formative years. They will not
be disappointed. "

-Jeanette Winterson, The Times (London)

"I cannot praise Spurling's measured, brilliantly researched and
wonderfully written biography enough."

-Adrian Searle, The Guardian


"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 . . .

"Spurling's monumental biography challenges [the view that Matisse was a
lightweight compared to Picasso]. It deepens and makes more complex our
understanding of Matisse."


-Frances Spalding, The Sunday Times

‘Spurling Volume 1 invites comparison with John Richardson’s Life of Picasso . . . her achievement is in some respects even greater than Richardson’s . . . Hilary Spurling has transformed Matisse studies.’
–William Feaver, Times Educational Supplement

‘A superlative achievement . . . It is a dramatic, moving and sometimes comical story, and all one can hope is that, without relaxing her admirably rigorous standards, Spurling won’t keep us waiting very long for Volume Two.’
–Elizabeth Cowling, Times Literary Supplement

‘Matisse . . . suggests the opposite of the strenuous, discomforting novelty which so much of the art of this century has aimed at embodying . . . It is the purpose of this biography, triumphantly achieved, to reverse that notion in every detail . . . this book transforms our sense not only of Matisse but also of his work.’
–Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph

‘Miraculous . . . the best life of a painter that I have ever read . . . For all the intelligence and sensibility of her approach, Spurling charts [Matisse’s life] with the agonising excitement of great fiction.’
–Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph