Not the untroubled man they said he was

MONUMENTAL is the usual term for a biography that is profoundly researched, soberly though strikingly thought out and very long. To use the word for Hilary Spurling’s biography of Henri Matisse, occupying two volumes and more than 1,000 pages, would not do it justice.

For one thing, it is written with unfailing grace, clarity and darting insight (astonishing for a dart to cover such a distance), its mass of materials all but volatilized. For another, rather than the weight of a monument, it has the impetus of a journey.

“Matisse the Master,” along with the earlier volume, “The Unknown Matisse,” is a trail of turnings and discoveries, of landscapes -- like Matisse’s canvasses -- that suggest tigers lurking behind the figures and foliage, occasional flat stretches and, above all, the whiff of combat. Spurling writes with visual and intuitive acuity about the paintings, but instead of lying flat on her pages, they become active and often painful happenings along the journey.

Calm was what Matisse said his art should produce (he invoked the conceit of a tired businessman relaxing in his chair), but Spurling confirms what our eyes have now come to see: not just the calm after the storm, but the calm that only a storm can bring about even as it still threatens.

Why, upon my first visit to the apparently simple radiance of Vence’s Chapelle Matisse, did I burst into tears for only the third or fourth time in a long adult life; and subsequently set my sleeve on fire standing too close to a church candle? “Do you conceive that you are Joan of Arc, monsieur?” a woman asked nearby.

Vividly conveying Matisse’s art, “Matisse the Master” portrays the storminess that worked through the artist over the last 45 years of his 85-year life. Seven years ago, reviewing the first volume, novelist Julian Barnes came up with a splendidly apposite quote from his beloved Flaubert: “When you write the biography of a friend, you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.”

No question how Spurling feels about her subject. In her preface, she wages revenge against what she calls two misconceptions. Not so much because they distort Matisse’s life, she insists, but because they distort the way his art has been looked at.

One of these, she writes, holds that in contrast with the seemingly embattled Picasso, Matisse spent the last half of his life easy and untroubled in the Midi, turning out easy and untroubled work (the Nice interior-cum-houri paintings, the paper cutouts, the chapel).

The charge was widely made in art circles while Matisse was alive, and it still receives support. In her account of the travails of those years, Spurling sounds the depth between the art and the life.

The second is the belief that the painter slept with the models he depicted so sensuously. Spurling assembles a fascinating rebuttal. For something that can’t quite be proved, her argument makes a case that is persuasive if not objectively absolute. It goes beyond the specifics to unearth Matisse’s view of the role sensuality played in his power to create.

He told poet Louis Aragon that he could muster the intensity needed for painting only through his feelings for the model. She is there “not so much to provide possible information about her physical constitution as to keep me in a state of emotion, a sort of flirtation which ends up by turning into a rape. Whose rape? A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in the face of a sympathetic object.” Have the feeling, in other words, for the purpose of sublimating it.

More lightly -- but in its discriminating French particularity, even more persuasive -- he tells an interviewer he would no more sleep with a model than go on to eat, however hungry, the seafood he’d painted. (When he finished with oysters, the cafe waiter would retrieve them for other people’s lunches.)

It is all part of Spurling’s theme. Except for the endless ups and downs of Matisse’s turbulent relations with his wife and children -- vital but perhaps excessively spelled out -- her massive detail is so linked to a buoyant thought or characterization as to nourish the buoyancy, not sink it.

She draws on correspondence with Matisse’s family and friends, and on memoirs and talks with those who knew him, including the companion of his late years, Lydia Delectorskaya. All along, she portrays a man who, coming from a hardworking bourgeois family from France’s stolid northeast, found that giving voice to his artistic genius was as painful as it was inevitable. He needed strong emotion to break through to it; beginning each piece was agony, sometimes taking him to the verge of illness.

Matisse would work and rework. His daughter Marguerite reproached him for raising everything to a higher level of difficulty (one that miraculously -- or perhaps not -- is invisible in the freedom, lyrical and terrible, of the result). “You set out once more from a canvas already marvelously balanced by your natural gifts,” she wrote him, “to attack the hard place, the high rock from which you either discover a new horizon, or destroy the canvas.”

“Matisse the Master” begins with Matisse’s return from his 1909 show in Berlin, where his Fauve paintings were lambasted. At home, he seemed perennially out of step with critical fashions. From denunciation for its wildness, the Fauve work was later snubbed as old hat under the rising star of Cubism. The bleak beauty of his paintings during World War I made little stir; by contrast, the Nice-period interiors were denounced as facile sellouts.

In fact, many of his greatest works went abroad: The formidable collections assembled in pre-Revolution Moscow by Sergei Shchukin, and in Baltimore by Etta Cone. It was part of the reason Matisse was so long underrated in France while acclaimed elsewhere.

Another was Pablo Picasso’s spectacular talent for performative preemption -- the cliques and claques he encouraged, the theatricality that allowed genius to soar on promotion’s wings -- while Matisse, his own soaring painfully internal, lacked the talent or taste for this. Ironically, it was the Spaniard, not the Frenchman, who knew how to psyche out Paris; but then, it was Jerry Lewis, not M. Hulot, who became France’s comic idol.

The lifelong current that ran between the two -- surface rivalry and a mutual tidal acknowledgment that the other was the century’s only other great artist -- makes an irresistible story: There were mutual visits, horseback rides, as well as a cook employed by Gertrude Stein (Picasso’s advocate) who made omelets for Picasso but would only fry eggs for Matisse, to show less respect.

Spurling goes beyond these familiar stories to portray a kind of serene old-age climax. It comes in a series of visits by Picasso and Francoise Gilot in the late 1940s. A semi-invalid after several operations, Matisse lay in bed working on the colored-paper cutouts that provided deliverance -- and transformative art -- after the agonies of painting.

“There is nothing to resist the passage of the scissors,” a friend had noted, “nothing to demand the concentrated attention of painting or drawing, there are no juxtapositions or borders to be borne in mind. And the little creatures extracted from their element fall from the scissors in quivering spirals, and subside like those fragile organisms the sea leaves washed up on the sand.”

At one point, Picasso brought a magician to the bedside as tribute. It was a genuine gesture -- and a characteristic performance. Matisse responded with his own gesture, characteristically grounded in the making, not the performing (well, maybe just a touch). He cut out shards of paper that gradually fitted together as portraits of Gilot, Picasso and the magician.

“We were spellbound, in a state of suspended breathing ... “ Gilot wrote. “We sat there like stones, slowly emerging from a trance.”

For the great years of the cutouts, a late burst of painting and the incredible marshaling of last resources -- graphically and triumphantly described -- to create the Vence chapel, Spurling recalls an earlier incident. When Matisse moved to Nice in 1918, he would faithfully visit the dying Renoir in Cagnes. Shrunken, crippled with arthritis, the old painter still worked. “The pain passes, Matisse, but the beauty remains,” he said. *