NONFICTION - Oct. 3, 1993

MATISSE: A Portrait; by Hayden Herrera (Harcourt Brace: $29.95 ; 223 pp.) He was pompous and egotistical. He was eminently respectable, even bourgeois. He was and remains opaque. The fundamental precept of his art was: “The simpler the means, the more apparent the sensibility.” He believed in painting “the essential character of things.” He was hell on wheels for his devoted wife, Amelie, whose life was almost completely subordinated to his own, and whose spiritual and financial support saw him through many anxious times. Having resisted the influence of impressionism, he founded, together with the painter Andre Derain in the summer of 1905, the first avant-garde style of the 20th Century: Fauvism. As he grew older and more famous, and, Herrera claims, under the influence of Cubism, his paintings became “less sensuous, more abstract, more rectilinear in structure, and more sober in color.” In 1944 his wife and daughter were captured by the Gestapo and “punished for their involvement in the French Resistance.” Many of his paintings were labeled ‘degenerate’ and burned by the Nazis. The book is thoughtfully arranged, with photographs and paintings (including many color plates). And Herrera has opened the door a crack to give us a look at the master’s creative process. But Matisse remains a bit of a cold-hearted mystery, and side by side with photos of the artist and his family, the paintings dominate, are far more colorful and sensual and well composed than the story of his life.