The Achievement of Matisse

"One of the oddest things about Henri Matisse," Hilary Spurling says at the outset of Matisse the Master, the sequel to her magisterial The Unknown Matisse, "is that he has had no biography until now, fifty years after his death." There have been excellent studies of Matisse's art—by Alfred Barr, Jack Flam, and Pierre Schneider—but nothing, until now, that permits us to see his work in the context of his family, friends, models, and patrons, and set against his historical and geographical background. He was a man from the industrial north, Spurling notes in her first volume, and his "life may be construed as a flight towards the brilliant light, the singing colours and apparently effortless freedom of his painting." Like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Matisse gravitated to the south: in his case, to Collioure, where (together with André Derain) he created Fauvism in 1905; to Spain and North Africa, where he was dazzled by Islamic traditions; to Nice, where he spent his last years as an invalid producing some of the most joyous and life-affirming artworks of the twentieth century.

Matisse's life was a paradox: "on the one hand, the lucid, orderly intelligence harnessed to a prodigious capacity for work and, on the other, the ravening imagination that had to be curbed and tamed before it could be allowed to soar freely." To the crowds at the various Matisse exhibitions on view in America, Europe, and Japan in recent years, his art represents a triumph of French elegance, charm, joie de vivre. But such paradisaical lucidity did not come easily. Explaining to Françoise Gilot the genesis of his radiant Basket of Oranges (1912), owned by Gilot's lover Pablo Picasso, Matisse exclaimed, "It was born of misery." Elsewhere he described his sun-drenched Fauve paintings as having "the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice." At virtually every point in his career, Matisse was assailed by self-doubt, family tensions, jeers from the public and critics alike. Even today, Spurling declares, there is a widespread misconception of one of his sayings: "He said that art should be as soothing as a good armchair, a metaphor that has done him more harm ever since than any other image he might have chosen. In fact 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."

Spurling dedicated the first volume of her biography to Amélie Matisse (that book's "heroine"), who sustained her husband during the initial years when his art was considered worthless. During one period of particular poverty, she pawned a favorite ring so that he could buy a Cézanne painting of bathers which thereafter had a totemic significance for him. "If Cézanne is right," Matisse affirmed, "then I am right." He painted his wife many times during the first decade of their marriage. She sat for the Woman in a Hat (1905), which was the sensation of the first Fauve exhibition. (A critic, noting the presence of an innocuous sculpture in a room at the Salon d'Automne containing the work of Matisse and his friends, called it "a Donatello among the wild beasts [les fauves].") But despite his strong feeling for her, Matisse made clear to Amélie early on that he would always choose painting over her. One can see the tensions in their marriage in two masterpieces owned by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg: the Portrait of Mme Matisse in blue of 1913 (an homage to Cézanne's portraits of his wife), which made her weep when she saw how her husband had transformed her face into an African mask; and The Conversation of 1912, in which a standing Matisse, in striped pajamas, looks down at an abject seated Am...