Coloring in the lines
A new book illuminates the remarkable career of modern artist Henri Matisse, painted in contrast to his fairly unremarkable life away from the canvas.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published September 20, 2005
REVIEW
Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954 by Hilary Spurling, Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 512 pages.
The question is: Can you write a fascinating biography about a person who lived a boring life? In the case of Hilary Spurling, author of Matisse the Master, the answer is no. But more important is that Spurling has written an often interesting and exhaustively researched biography that was too long coming.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is considered, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the two greatest artists of the 20th century. Spurling published Volume One of Matisse the Master seven years ago. This second installment, subtitled The Conquest of Color, picks up the thread in 1909 and continues to his death. Oddly, as opposed to the tomes written about Picasso, this is the first comprehensive account of Matisse.
Maybe it's not so odd. People have generally assumed that what little they knew about Matisse was enough, that he needed to be approached only through his work, now universally praised by critics and beloved by the public. After all, he lived a quiet life, compared with the drama and majesty of Picasso's with his multiple wives and lovers, his worshipful court and bravado personality. Matisse doesn't make good copy for a biographer in a time when readers want dish.
That we know so little about the man helps Spurling's cause and keeps us reading this 500-page-plus doorstop of a book. Much of the information she conveys is gleaned from letters and family papers never before opened to public scrutiny. What we discover is a man with every bit as much ego and self-absorption as Picasso, masked by a veneer of gentility and redeemed in part by his kindness and innate decency. More than once, this professorial, courtly man seemed like a reincarnation of Abraham, willing to lay on the altar anything and anyone, even those he loved the most, in obeisance to his magnificent obsession.
Spurling refutes a number of misconceptions about Matisse. The Picasso connection, for example, has been mined in a number of books, essays and exhibitions, even during the artists' lifetimes. The most recent comparative retrospective was the magnificent "Matisse/Picasso" at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2003. Most have set up the relationship as a rivalry. In Spurling's book, Picasso is a secondary player like everyone else in Matisse's life. Matisse took the other man's measure, acknowledged his gifts and went on with what he wanted to do.
And the only thing Matisse wanted to do - madly, truly, deeply - was paint. The bulk of Spurling's narrative follows Matisse's obsessive quest to master color, to use it to convey volume and mass, in his words to create "an expressive marriage of differently colored and proportioned surfaces" which was a new approach to the medium.
But writing about paint drying on a canvas would be, well, dry. Instead, the author wraps Matisse's story around his creative journey - the way external events shaped it, the way others perceived it and the effect it had on those closest to him.
He painted his way out of the miseries and deprivations of two world wars, the serious illnesses of his beloved daughter, Marguerite, his own physical infirmities, the defection of his wife, Amelie, after decades of marriage, and the extreme see-saw of opinion about his work throughout his career.
When the book opens in 1909, Matisse is 40 and has purged himself of early "academic" training as a painter. An exhibition several years earlier with contemporaries such as Andre Derain lumped them all under the Fauve label, referring to the wild color combinations the group was experimenting with.
Matisse was settled into a serene family life with Amelie and children, Marguerite, Pierre and Jean. (Marguerite was his illegitimate child with a previous lover, whom Amelie raised as her own daughter.) Amelie provided the ballast, taking care of everything, even cleaning his brushes each night, so he was free to create with no distractions. The children were taught to remain quiet and to take on any task required to eliminate distraction in Matisse's life.
Many children would have rebeled, but Matisse's remained devoted and reverential, especially Marguerite, who became her father's most trusted and respected adviser and critic.
The Piano Lesson from 1916 is a portrait of his son Pierre, who would later have a notable career as an art dealer. Though Pierre was a teenager when it was created, Matisse paints him as a child, trapped behind the piano which his father made him practice endlessly. He hoped Pierre would become a great musician as Matisse himself had once wanted to be. The small face is flawed by an ominous black wedge and he's surrounded by emblems of control: a metronome and hourglass, a sculpture and painting by his father. Planes of gray that look like bars are interrupted by the filigree of an iron balcony - the jail is pretty! - and beyond it a swath of green, the sunlit garden which Pierre has been denied.
Pierre commented much later, to a group of admirers looking at the painting, "You have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons."
Matisse did know and The Piano Lesson is a moving apology that he could never deliver verbally.
Matisse was profoundly attached to his wife for most of their marriage. He fussed and complained when they were apart, even though the separations were imposed by the artist, who would spend months by himself painting in Nice while Amelie and Marguerite took care of the home front in Paris.
Amelie also provided the unswerving support Matisse needed to bolster his confidence in the face of relentless critical reaction to his art. In the early years of their marriage, Matisse's complete reliance on her gave her life its greatest meaning. But she swallowed many resentments that later spilled from her like bile.
The Paris art world had buzzed for years about Matisse and his female models, with whom he would work in isolation for months, assuming they were also his lovers. Spurling discounts the peccadillo theory based on accounts by visitors, friends and the women themselves, who all claim that Matisse treated his models with professional, sometimes fatherly courtliness. Amelie herself was fond of the young women who posed for her husband and only became jealous when she felt her managerial supremacy had been threatened. In 1938, she forced an ultimatum, asking Matisse to chose between her and his assistant. He dithered and equivocated. Amelie left for good.
This wasn't the only personal relationship he neglected. He wrote steady streams of tender, newsy letters to his family during his absences, but when crises loomed - one of the most traumatic was an experimental surgery Marguerite almost didn't survive - Matisse stayed away, wracked by guilt and anxiety but unable to tear himself away from his canvasses.
But for all his personal failings, Matisse never betrayed his loved ones' faith in his vision.
Spurling's book inventories the remarkable sweep of his long career and helps explain the ambivalence many of his contemporaries had about it. Most of Matisse's paintings prior to World War I were bought by wealthy Russian collectors who became refugees after the Russian Revolution. Their possessions, including their art, were confiscated, and Matisse's paintings moldered in Soviet storerooms for decades. Collections belonging to his few French admirers were sold off piecemeal during both world wars. And museums weren't interested in them. So few people had an opportunity to assess the artist's work comprehensively until the mid 20th century.
When World War II ended, Matisse didn't help himself with an insistence on creating paintings that looked both too pretty and too odd. His vibrant, otherworldly colors, the riots of texture, surfaces and objects painted with shifting perspective, the human distortions were neither wholly abstract nor figurative. Their loveliness brought charges that they were bland and facile, even from his children. Worse, they were being purchased by fashionable people as drawing room art.
The artist ignored the swipes. Increasingly, the only reality that interested him was the one he created in his art that he compared to "a rape . . . a rape of myself," saying that he always wanted to strangle someone before beginning a painting. The calm and composed facade he presented to the world hid a volcanic, agonized inner life slaked by mastery of his creative materials.
One of Matisse's favorite actors was Charlie Chaplin. He loved the gravitas and pathos below the surface of a comic gesture, admiring the fluidity with which Chaplin could convey both simultaneously. That is what Matisse strove for and ultimately achieved, art that could be beautiful and unsettling in perfect union.
Spurling's admirable biography has two great lapses. It focuses on Matisse's paintings to the exclusion of greater detail about his important sculptures and magnificent drawings. The other is its too-tactful treatment of money. Matisse lived for much of his life in comfort and died, we are given reason to believe, a wealthy man. In a book loaded with so many details, few are provided about his finances.
At the end of his life, unable to stand at an easel, Matisse turned to the pure, flat colors of painted paper, sitting alone in his wheelchair slicing abstract forms with scissors and assembling them into large collages. They became the grand apotheosis of his career. Of the last sketch he drew, as he lay dying at age 84, he said, "It will do."
Irish poet Dylan Thomas summed up the creative credo by which all great artists live: "In my craft or sullen art exercised in the still night when only the moon rages and the lovers lie abed with all their griefs in their arms, I labor by singing light."
Dilettantes, stay away.