Product Description

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.

Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.

If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #357044 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The first volume of Spurling's magisterial biography, The Unknown Matisse, covered his evolution into a painter. This second volume opens with his adjusting to the status—albeit controversial—of master. At 40, Matisse found himself with both the freedom to paint and the burden of a reputation that drew enemies, disciples and skeptics into his working life. This shift from obscurity to notoriety had less impact on Matisse's work than on his personal relationships, especially his marriage to the single-minded Amélie, a bond that became saturated, for better and worse, with his achievements. Matisse's other relationships—with his daughter, Marguerite, his son, Pierre, his model and factotum Lydia Dylectorskaya and his patron Etta Cone among others—were likewise compounded of dedication and turmoil. The work, meanwhile, took its own course, whether mutating through a single epic piece or proliferating in new media, through two world wars and an absolute transformation in the tenets of and expectations for art. Spurling's chief source is a huge but largely untapped collection of correspondence, on which she draws very deftly to convey the mood and tone of various sojourns in Paris, Nice, Tangiers, Tahiti and elsewhere. In addition to 24 pages of color plates, the book is peppered with b&w photographs, portraits and sketches. Spurling's rich, flexible style is well attuned to the rigors and flights of Matisse's creative life. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Although a sublime colorist and draftsman extraordinaire, Henri Matisse was wracked by doubts and infirmities throughout his long and brilliant career. In this riveting biography -- you can enjoy volume 2 without reading its predecessor, which covered the years 1869-1908 -- Hilary Spurling authoritatively recounts how the French artist persevered despite prolonged insomnia and frequent, sometimes life-threatening illnesses. Among the most painful of his afflictions may have been his fear that his reputation would not last. In 1935, he told his daughter, Marguerite, "The worry that haunts me is that I'll end up being forgotten." The large crowds who recently viewed "Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams" at London's Royal Academy and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art prove that he needn't have worried. Long after his death in 1954 at the age of 84, Matisse's popularity endures.

Just as Matisse transformed lithe models, narrow hotel rooms, swarming plants and flowers, and hand-colored papers into beguiling works of art, Spurling breathes life into what many had assumed was a humdrum story. The father of three children -- Marguerite and two sons -- Matisse along with his wife, Amélie, appeared to be a picture of conventionality. In 1913, a magazine reported, "the real Matisse . . . hurries to open the door in his gardening clothes when you ring the bell." He went to bed early, kept to a rigorous routine, made sure his son Pierre practiced the piano diligently. Of his visits to cafés in Tangier with a friend, the artist said, "I drank as many glasses of mineral water as he took of spirits." During various periods, Matisse swam laps, rode horses, took foxtrot lessons, rowed boats, went on diets and played the violin to relax. While he was painting "Dance," a masterpiece that now hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, he hummed dance-hall tunes. He owned a home with a telephone, bathroom and central heating when his fellow Fauves -- the phrase "wild beasts" was used to describe their expressive use of color -- were just getting by. He bought an automobile when they were a rare commodity.

His father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, wasn't impressed. After touring the beautifully appointed house and grounds in Issy, near Paris, Henri Matisse Sr. looked at the well-kept flowerbeds and said, "Why not grow something useful, like potatoes?"

Though he loved his home and family, Matisse had a penchant for traveling. He took trips to exotic locales -- Tahiti, Tangier, the Alhambra -- the way Pablo Picasso changed mistresses. He went abroad to experience different light effects and native colors. In North Africa, the artist studied motifs that had intrigued the incomparable French 19th-century Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix; in Tahiti, he found Paul Gauguin's unmarked grave and looked up Emile, Gauguin's son. In 1919, the year Auguste Renoir died, Matisse, 39 at the time, regularly visited the aged Impressionist.

As an artist, Matisse was single-minded, driven, desperate. It often took him years to complete individual paintings and sculptures. He frequently explained to Marguerite, Spurling writes, that "it was better to ruin a painting than to be satisfied with quick results." Matisse worked on "Bathers by a River," which he considered one of his five "pivotal" canvases, for seven years, and on "The Conversation" for at least four. It took him seven years to sculpt "Large Seated Nude." Today, like most of his work, they look, as if they had been effortless to create. It's unsettling, then, to learn that this 20th-century titan once commented, as if referring to himself, "A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand." Spurling details how, when Matisse was painting (which was a great deal of the time), he abandoned his family for months on end. Amélie Matisse had been forewarned. Soon after they met, her future husband told her, "I love you dearly, mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more." This turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, when in Nice or traveling abroad, Matisse, wrote long letters to Amélie, Marguerite, Pierre and friends such as the painters Pierre Bonnard and Simon Bussy. It's Spurling's treatment of this correspondence, which she suggests combines "a diary's scope and freedom with the frankness of the confessional," that makes this biography so illuminating. Putting aside up to an hour or more in the evening, the artist described in great detail what he saw or did or hoped to achieve. The self-proclaimed "hermit of the Promenade des Anglais" in Nice was in constant contact with his wife and children. At first, his family didn't mind the sacrifices they were asked to make. Whenever Matisse sent new pictures to his house, it was Christmas in July. As his severest critics unwrapped them, they mostly oohed and aahed. But at a certain point, the situation soured. After running studio and business affairs for years, Amélie Matisse withdrew her services not long after being distressed by a portrait for which she sat twice a day for three months. To no avail, the painter described the canvas as "the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty."

Marguerite then took over until she married. After that, things got dicey. Lydia Delectorskaya, a 22-year-old Russian émigré hired as a studio assistant while Matisse, then in his sixties, was painting the mural "Dance," became the ailing Amélie's companion; and then left that position to oversee Matisse's studio and life. The wife demanded that the golden-haired, blue-eyed manager be fired, insisting, "It's me or her." "I was sacked," Delectorskaya told Spurling years later. "Madame wanted me to leave, not from female jealousy -- there was no question of adultery -- but because I was running the whole house." When Madame Matisse demanded a divorce anyway, the painter rehired Delectorskaya. Amélie Parayre walked out on Matisse after 31 years of marriage. Delectorskaya stayed at her employer's side for two decades.

"Matisse felt his family no longer had faith in him, or in his latest painting," Spurling writes, "which came to the same thing." As his factotum, Delectorskaya tirelessly supported all his efforts. During the spring of 1941, the 71-year-old painter seemed to be living on borrowed time. Suffering from fever, dizziness and palpitations, he could not even hold a pencil (previously, during years when he was too weak to paint, he drew copiously). At the height of World War II, his Russian aide kept the studio running, which was tantamount to keeping the artist alive.

Early in 1945, Matisse "told his daughter he had gone as far as he could with oil painting." And so he had. In the remaining years of his life, though bedridden, he spent four years designing the glorious Chapel of the Rosary at Vence and ended his career with a flourish by fashioning seductive, wall-sized cut-outs with a pair of scissors, lots of straight pins, paste and hand-painted sheets of color. Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the Salon de Automne exhibition, where paintings now accepted as masterpieces once unsettled the critics and public. It is now seen as the moment when the Fauve master entered the history of art with his daring, unorthodox use of color. Spurling's absorbing biography celebrates a chronic insomniac who shocked the art world at the beginning of his career and then, as death approached, continued to create transcendent, life-affirming work.

Reviewed by Phyllis Tuchman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Spurling devoted two volumes and more than 1,000 pages to her biography of Henri Matisse, and it is clear that she fell in love with the great artist by the time she had finished. Critics labeled Matisse the Master and its predecessor a monumental achievement worthy of its subject, and they noted that the second volume could easily stand on its own. Extensively researched and lovingly written, Spurling brings both the artist and his work to life, even for those already familiar with Matisse. If any criticism can be made about Spurling's book, it is that she approaches her subject too closely and is too quick to remove his life and work from their historical context.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An Artist's Artist
Matisse is considered by many to be one of the most prominent artists of the 20th century, with Picasso being the other. Cezanne, of course, was the spiritual father of them both. The problem with Matisse was that he was so devoted to his art that it was almost as a mistress to him, to the detriment of his marriage and family and nearly all other relationships.

Matisse went his own artistic way and did exactly what he wanted regardless of what his family or the public thought. He was sometimes considered a Fauvist (colors reigning supreme) and sometimes an abstractionist, but never realistic and traditional. His art was seen during his lifetime as shameless, unrealistic, existentialistic, and simple in a child-like way, erotic, lewd, and many other things. People are less shocked by it today since it is seen in the context of anything-goes late 20th century and early 21st century work; his so-called sexy odalisques, for example, are mild by today's standards. He was seen as a decorative light-weight in comparison to Picasso, who did more energetic and masculine work. Helen Spurling thinks the disappearance of so much of Matisse's work from the public eye diminishes his true status as a great artist; some of his work went to Russia via his Russian patron and was retained there unseen because of the Cold War. Picasso and Matisse, by the way, became close friends towards the end of his life. He was almost like an elder brother to Picasso and in a certain sense they had an exclusive club based on their art which no one else could understand.

I've always liked Matisse and have seen the great Cone Collection of his works at the Baltimore Museum many times. I confess not totally understanding what he was trying to do in simplifying the shapes and colors and flattening the depth of so many of his works. I'm starting to see that he was an artist's artist, unconcerned whether the public understands him or not. I guess that's OK, but he suffered severe criticism most of his life because of it. He was almost admirable, like a monk totally disciplined for his god, Art. The women in his life made his life as an artist possible. His wife Amelie and daughter Margo took care of all the details outside of his work and a Russian model named Lydia did so towards the end of his life. Unfortunately, Amelie thought (incorrectly per the book) that Margo and Henri were lovers and that broke up the marriage after WWII.

Hilary Spurling does a good job of condensing and making sense of the massive correspondence of Matisse and his family. My only complaint is that it could have been more condensed. It felt a little too much like a daily log in certain places. I'm sure she was trying to finally give the master his due.

More than history of art
Superb! Not only one of the best biographies I've read, it get's into the mind of the artist. This is not an easy thing to do. I read it as I would a novel, it was very hard to put down.

Art is the Air That I Breathe
"Artists are like plants whose growth in the thickets of the jungle depends on the air they breathe, and the mud or stones among which they grow by chance and without choice." Matisse's words coupled with his life as proof of what van Gogh said about the love of art making one lose real love make the reader feel the pain, the joy and the rich colours of his life all that much more. He made us understand.

Hilary Spurling's masterpiece (savoured by me for endless months, days and hours) has been an extraordinary experience I never wanted to end - both volumes. And now her biography is all locked in my mind - hopefully, to be recalled again and again in painting after painting and life experience after love experience - thanks to all the years of her hard work and research.

I am now filled with the colours of the Master - just as he'd installed 'The Tree of Life' in "a change of key that brought an extraordinary clarity, serenity and stillness to the music of the chapel." If the student of art, the student of life might only read pp. 455-456, he/she would be amazed at one whose talents were mocked ("any child could paint better than Matisse." ... "...his inventions seemed not simply monstrous but blasphemous as well.") and would ache to have had the chance to be a simple fly on the wall in those last years of his life when the many energies swirled about his taxi beds and many wond'rous studios ever-changing, metamorphosing, revealing and displaying, nurturing, teaching... revolutionary!

Let us not forgot his bedrocks - the women who made all his successes possible are miraculous and astonishing... Lydia, Matisse's remarkable genius manager (we should all be so lucky to know such a dynamo); Amelie, his extraordinary wife and her 'nine lives'; of course, Marguerite, his daughter, whose amazing vitality and strength of character resounds on almost every page of his life story; she was one (by her great courage) who humbled him more than anyone else could; and the countless models and interns...

As a side note... I remember in January 2006 when Hilary Spurling "scooped one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards," Whitbread Book of the Year prize, just as the big scandal exploded about Oprah's book club "author" protégé/scam artist James Frey was exposed. I thought to myself, "There is still a god!" What kind of mindless person would turn to Oprah for advice on what to read in the first place?! What does she know about literature?

I am humbled at Hilary Spurling's great accomplishment and would love to meet her one day so I could sing her the song I wrote about Matisse and the story of his blue butterfly. [...]

"The blue of that butterfly and Cezanne
made you more of a spiritual man."