![]() ![]() Spurling attributes to Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace a cocooning “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. Her parents were ruined in a spectacular scandal, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. She “had spent much of her life searching for a cause in which she could put her faith,” Spurling writes. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” How much did he mean that? He meant it to the extent of warning his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle but I shall always love painting more.” Amélie assented. ![]() He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. He was an unhappy law clerk when, in 1889, he began to study drawing and, while laid up with appendicitis, was given a set of paints by his mother. “The Unknown Matisse” told of an awkward youth from a dismal region of northern France-he was born in the cottage of his maternal grandmother, in 1869, and was raised in Bohain, an industrial textile center. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. Matisse’s greatness resides in capacities of the eye and the mind that almost anyone, with willingness, can discern, and no one, with whatever training, can really comprehend. ![]() The fact that she is an amateur in art matters proves to be an advantage, given that she is also unfailingly sensitive and thoroughly informed. Spurling is a veteran English theatre and literary critic and a biographer of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. ![]() Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses-perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds. Matisse threw himself into painting “like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Photograph from Alamy ![]()
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