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A master’s life
Hilary Spurling’s Matisse
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

Everybody knows the name Henry Matisse. Many know his paintings, particularly his " Fauve " works from 1905-’09. Fewer know much else about Matisse’s paintings — who collected them or commissioned them, or where they are now — and fewer still know much about the man, partly because until Britain’s Hilary Spurling undertook to write his life, no biography had been published. Her first volume, The Unknown Matisse, ran from 1869 to 1908; this second volume covers the remaining years, 1909–1954. She writes knowledgeably about the art (and that of his predecessors, rivals, and colleagues), distressingly about the art market (the dealers, collectors, and commissioners of works; the museum curators, critics, and fans), and intimately about his family relationships.

Matisse was as difficult a man as his paintings were painful to create. From afar, he and his art were worshipped; closer in, both looked less comfortable; seen intimately, the paintings worried observers. Russian (Sergei Shchukin), American (Sarah and Michael Stein; H. C. Barnes; Etta and Dr. Claribel Cone), and Danish collectors bought his most daring works. Berlin and Munich came calling from time to time. French museums, however, mostly declined. French critics always liked the painting before the one they were writing about but hardly ever that one.

The artist was a celebrity, the man not at all. Often he found himself no longer spoken to by people — many of them female models and painters who would gladly have become his mistress — who had seen him as a god. His wife, Amélie, separated from him, long after he had seemed to separate from her. His two sons drifted away, one, Pierre, to America to become an art dealer of note. Only daughter Marguerite stayed by his side, after the separation, after the 1941 colostomy operation that left him wheelchair bound; she was there at his death bed. So was Lydia Delectorskaya: she was his model from the 1930s to the end, his companion, and possibly his mistress, but she always kept her suitcases packed.

As for the paintings, most of them left too. Amélie took half of what he had held on to; collectors took most of the rest; others ended up in museums scattered across much of the globe. His sculptures drew scant attention except from younger, more obviously outcast artists. Spurling also writes of Matisse’s work as a designer of clothes, much of it costuming made for theater impresarios (Diaghilev was one); and of course all of his costuming was soon consumed, and gone. At his death, in Vence in 1954, many of the master’s works had never been shown, except to the guests who came to his collectors’ houses.

Yet Matisse prevailed. His reputation now approaches that of Picasso, though you can hardly compare Matisse’s virtuosity in color with Picasso’s genius at drawing. Picasso’s insight into how to paint the dark interiors of surface things captured the fancy of artists and the public; Matisse’s subtler probes into the abstract, the morbid, and the disconnected took longer — often far longer — to be understood, never mind acclaimed. Yet here he is — influencing the shape, the structure, the hue, and the purpose of painting, both portraits and still-lifes. And what portraits! As dark as Rembrandt, as persistent as Cézanne, as hot-colored as Delacroix, as warm-blooded as Renoir, yet somehow true to the eye — but what an eye!


Issue Date: November 4 - 10, 2005
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