The sensuous recluse

Grey Gowrie

MATISSE: THE MASTER by Hilary Spurling Penguin, £25, pp. 512, ISBN 0241133394 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 What in the world has happened to the culture of France? If you enter a room almost anywhere in the West when two or three of the arterati are gathered together and ask them to name interesting young artists, no one will mention anyone French. The same goes for literature and drama. In music there is the octogenarian Boulez and a few disciples and, er, c’est ça. Cinema rocks but rock does not. The greatest French ballerina in a generation bolted for Covent Garden.

An answer may lie in a story told by Hilary Spurling to a group of fellow biographers. When 14 years ago she embarked on this triumph of a life, her triumph and Matisse’s, her French interlocutors were intrigued to know what her thesis might be, what angle or take on the artist she proposed. When she said she wanted only to say what happened to Matisse and those close to him they seemed at first puzzled, then bored. What happens is of little relevance to the French intelligentsia. Significance or some philosophical critique is all. Spurling’s very first sentences make the point:

One of the oddest things about Henri Matisse is that he has had no biography until now, 50 years

after his death . . . The blank pages of Matisse’s Olga Meerson’s portrait of Henri Matisse, 1911

life have been filled in over the past half century with half-truths, misconceptions and downright fabrications, many of them now so deeply embedded in art-historical culture that they seriously distort the ways in which people look at his paintings.

The passage is taken from Hilary Spurling’s preface to the life of Matisse and not the life itself. Nevertheless it seems to me an indictment, perhaps unintended, of what happens to an entire culture when it puts faith before fact and interpretative ideas before the works of art themselves. As the American poet and Matisse fan William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘So much depends/on the red wheelbarrow’. It does indeed, and when you grasp this concrete notion, you find that Matisse is one who makes a world with a colour like red and a form like a wheelbarrow (or a nude or a balcony) in it altogether new for you. ‘Matisse is a magician,’ said Picasso. He meant a conjuror, a magician of the ordinary who transforms the everyday.

Against the other great revolutionary artists of the last century — Picasso himself, Mondrian, Duchamp, Pollock, Rothko Matisse retains most power to shock. The shocking thing about him is that in a century when his country was twice invaded (he was fiercely patriotic) and his civilisation all but destroyed, the art was absolute for pleasure: for colour, music, fruit and flowers, jeunes filles en fleurs, patterns, dancing. Matisse is a revolutionary because he had to upset the art of painting to trap the pleasure and make it new.

He did not have much fun doing so. He described himself as having a ‘deeply sensuous nature’. It had to be subordinated to and kept for canvas, clay or cut-out. Drawing alone eased him. He worked all day and quite often at night, for he was insomniac. When he was not working he was either fretting about the work — it was going badly, it was all too difficult, he was on the wrong track or about not sleeping. In spite of his long life his health was fragile. He suffered colonic troubles and, a source of terror, from weak eyes. He was an uxorious and devoted man who loved his wife and children and was well aware of the strains of their being so implicated in a life of unremitting labour. He lived first in poverty, then in modest prosperity. But this only afforded time away from his family in order for him to be able to work even harder. Imagine the workload, and the family time, of a British prime minister, say, but lasting for 60 years rather than a couple of parliaments. Matisse was a northerner, a Puritan who came south for the joy his eye found there.

Hilary Spurling throws cold water on the previous almost universal assumption that Matisse slept with his models. Painting or drawing them was indeed a form of coition, but one left for us to enjoy, not Matisse. For ten years I lived with a Matisse nude line drawing lent me by a former flatmate. The sun shone on bosom and bush and derived from the white of the paper only, as it does in Van Gogh’s calligraphic landscape drawings of Provence. I miss it affectionately, like some once wonderful affair. When Matisse drew it, in the late 1920s, he was working apart from his family, in Nice. He would make occasional rather grumpy visits to local brothels but really preferred to row across the bay glimpsed in so many of his paintings. Rowing at least had the effect of keeping his weight down, necessary for a man who spent seven to eight hours each day standing before an easel.

Both Matisse’s admirers and detractors were amazed at the contrast between the painter’s orderly appearance, dull social life, seeming lack of political, intellectual or erotic concerns and the violence wreaked by his art on the norms of perception. How we think we perceive the world is very much conditioned by painting, and in Matisse’s lifetime by photography also, whereas how we in fact process it in terms of physical and emotional depth is altogether different. Matisse is the original modern painter of whom people said, ‘My child can do that’, thereby missing the point that wonderful things happen when an untutored response is contrived by a tutored one.

It was also the case that during Matisse’s lifetime many in France were not aware of his most revolutionary years, the decade from 1909 when the present volume begins. Hilary Spurling is herself good at portraying the Russian collector Shchukin. The greatest work went to Moscow, to Germany and, later, to Denmark and the USA. If you had to judge Matisse only by his paintings in France, he would be a big painter, on a par with his friend Bonnard, say, but no equal of Poussin, Cézanne and Picasso. On his death, the latter said of him ‘in the end, there is only Matisse’. The Matisse room in the old MoMA in New York is, or was, the temple of Western painting in the 20th century; in spite of rave reviews for MoMA’s rebuild, I hate contemplating its loss.

Matisse’s relations with collectors and the way the Russian revolution and two world wars left him ignorant of the fate of his greatest works form an exciting yet sombre part of the Spurling story. Art pales, however, as maybe it should in a biography whose ‘angle’ is the man himself and those around him, beside the life studies uncovered here. At the end of the book you feel you know how you might have approached Matisse, what you would have said to him, what manners could be displayed or expected. No less real seem the three women who ‘framed and shaped his life, pointing him towards the stern and sacrificial path he followed to the day he died’. They were his mother, prominent in Spurling’s first volume and cut off in occupied north-eastern France, the Matisse family terroir, when the Germans came in 1914; his wife Amélie and his daughter (by an early mistress but treated as one by Amélie), Marguerite. Marguerite was the most ferocious critic of Matisse’s work, and after his death she became the authority of record. With his anxious knowledge, she joined the Resistance in 1942 and was later tortured by the Gestapo. To these formidables we should add a fourth woman, the wonderfully named Matisse model Lydia Delectorskaya, who in spite of there being no adultery precipitated the separation, after decades of marriage and against her own and the painter’s wish, of Matisse and Amélie.

Russian Lydia, muse of the Barnes collection Dance and the late cut-outs, effectively replaced wife and daughter as managing director of Matisse Incorporated. That was the trouble. She provided the administrative calm as well as the inspirational luxuriance needed for his work. It is clear that her testimony, as well as Matisse’s immense and devoted correspondence with his family when parted from them, is the great source for this volume. She oversaw his last miracle, the chapel at Vence. In uneasy truce with Marguerite, she was at his bedside when he died.

From the point of view of a writer, marriages and the domestic drama are more fascinating, more terrible and more difficult to capture than love affairs. Hilary Spurling’s earlier immersion in the life and work of Ivy Compton-Burnett have stood her in excellent stead to describe this house and its head, this god and his gifts.

When it came to minding the office, all three of his children lived in fear of offending their implacable, inaccessible, inscrutable Papa, who issued instructions by letter or telegram . . . All three seemed to themselves to expend endless time and effort on attempts to placate a capricious and irascible deity who sent them scurrying this way and that in New York and Paris, simultaneously patronised and fawned on, and painfully conscious of their own equivocal footing in the art world.

The completion of so clear-eyed and unself-serving a life coincides with an equally mesmerising Royal Academy exhibition of Matisse’s art in relation to textiles; in her good years Amélie spent much time foraging for inspirational swatches. I hope Hilary Spurling gets the Légion d’Honneur. For the time being, however, one can only feel poor France, and lucky us.

The Royal Academy exhibition, Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, is reviewed on page 64.