Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918 <i> by Jack Flam (Cornell University: $75; 528 pp., 102 color and 395 black-and-white illustrations)</i>

According to the French writer, Max Jacob, Picasso once told him that if he had to paint like anyone other than himself, it would be Matisse. And Matisse once told him that if he had to paint like anyone other than himself, it would be Picasso.

It sounds too symmetrical to be true, but Jacob was famous for saintliness as well as gossip, and perhaps truth-telling went with the territory.

The two were rivals; at least in the sense that others thought of them that way. Reflecting her employer’s preference for Picasso, Gertrude Stein’s cook refused to make omelets for Matisse and kept him to fried eggs, on the ground that it showed “less respect.”

Each man clearly regarded the other as his personal pace-maker. They were the giants of 20th-Century art; both wore their big boots a long, long time; neither one relaxed into them; both went on changing.

Protean, the pair, but in vastly different ways. Our image of Picasso is of the prestidigitator; the prodigious child inexhaustibly devising new games. And we think of Matisse as the rotund and reposeful old gentleman, artificer more than magician, whose brush and, eventually scissors were touched, Midas-like, with gold.

It is the demolition of this Olympian image that provides the spark for Jack Flam’s detailed, penetrating and beautifully assembled study of Matisse’s development up to the time when, nearly 50, he moved permanently to the south of France.

I say “spark” rather than “theme.” The book’s main purpose is to put together the technical, artistic and spiritual aspects of the years when Matisse was going through his most active and changeable period of experiment and development. But offering a troubled image to replace the serene one constitutes both an essential part of Flam’s study and that whiff of gunpowder that helps a major work of scholarship come to life.

In his preface, Flam sprinkles a little of the gunpowder on Alfred Barr’s classic study of Matisse, dating from the 1950s. He calls it the most complete and reliable account “until now.” (He doesn’t discuss Pierre Schneider’s even more massive “Matisse,” which came out two years ago; although he quotes from it now and then.)

“Because Matisse was still alive while Barr was writing and because Barr was dependent on Matisse’s estranged wife and daughter for much of his information, the book strongly emphasizes Matisse’s bourgeois respectability,” Flam writes. “Early indiscretions, passions, struggles, and darknesses of spirit--even a whole decade of his life--are kept discreetly in shadow.”

Flam, for his part, mentions that Matisse slept with quite a few of his models, and speaks in some detail about the tide of sensuality that he believes overtook him in his later 40s. But the detail goes into an analysis of the painting, not the life. And, although the book gives essential biographical data, its emphasis and its value lie in Flam’s ardent and often inspired writing about Matisse’s work.

Flam vividly depicts Matisse’s struggle to reconcile within himself the disciplined, assiduous worker--he insisted that his students draw from plaster casts and use a plumb line--and the instinctive visionary. After painting an image from life with a colorful realism akin to Cezanne’s, he would frequently do a second version, in the flat, bright-hued style that we now think of as characteristic.

These pairings are amply illustrated throughout the book. Cornell University Press has done a splendid job, in fact. The colored plates--amounting to about one-fifth of the 500 illustrations--are not simply lavish but instructive. They follow the text with remarkable precision and hardly ever more than a page or two away from their reference--an impressive editorial feat for a book of this scale. It allows Flam not simply to argue his points but to demonstrate them.

The author makes it clear that nothing came easy. Matisse was sometimes taken aback by his own work, to the point of refusing to put it up on his studio wall. After doing a flat and simplified portrait of a sailor--a second version--he told people that it had been done by the postman.

It was in 1905, after years of experimenting and casting about, that Matisse’s painting exploded into vividness and stylization. He took portraits, still lifes and landscapes out to the point where pattern, color and the act of painting became the real subject of the work. Using “The Open Window, Collioure” (1905) as an example, Flam writes:

“The physical surface of the canvas takes primacy over the image that is applied to the painted surface. The work offers itself as what it is, as a physical object, as material--paint that has been worked by the hand.”

And in a phrase that magnificently sums up Matisse’s long oscillation between the need to draw vitality from the real world and the need to depart and transform it, Flam writes:

“When he did depart, he did so with such absolute conviction that he seemed to be reinventing nature as much as extending the art of painting.”

Without the anguish and the compunction, Matisse’s distortions and sunburst colors might have been--as they seemed to his critics at the time--capricious or glib. They were a kind of speaking in tongues, in fact, and achieved after intense struggle and self-questioning. Sometimes, for relief and replenishment, he would ease back into a stretch of realism with hints of Cezanne or even Corot.

It was never a fixed style in the five decades covered by the book. But the fluctuations didn’t seem to be, as with Picasso, a deliberate switching of roles and effects. They were like the movements of a bird caught in a thornbush and trying different ways to get free. “The lack of sureness about a single direction was one of the sources of his artistic fecundity,” Flam comments.

There are times when the author, documenting this spiritual and artistic biography by looking hard at the paintings, may look too hard. To see Matisse’s feelings of guilt about his father in the colors and forms of “The Red Studio” strikes me as extravagant, even though Flam makes his arguments. On the other hand, a sense of personal crisis is inescapable in the strangest of his celebrated window paintings. In most of these, a bright and decorated interior focuses upon an even brighter and more flowery exterior seen through open shutters.

But in a work entitled “Open Window, Collioure” (1914), the window opens on blackness. An open window with nothing beyond, like Ingmar Bergman’s clock faces without hands, is surely a sign of despair.

Flam ends his book in 1918, when Matisse, increasingly estranged from his wife, moves to Nice. Much of his celebrated work was still to come: the Odalisques, the ornamented rooms and gardens, the light; and decades later, the grand climaxes of the Vence Chapel and the cut-outs. Flam sees an easing-off in the years after 1918, though not a decline. He writes:

“For the past 20 years he had painted almost every picture as if his life depended on it. Now he would take another kind of risk, equally great though less obviously heroic: the risk of ceasing to take great risks in every work.”

I am not sure about that phrase. It sounds true, but oddly bland. Perhaps it is simply not one of Flam’s favorite truths. It was the risky first 50 years, after all, that he chose to write about.