ART
Invisible man
TISHANI DOSHI
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In Henri Matisse's case, the prevailing notion was that his life was too dull and tame to write about. But author Hilary Spurling dispels that.
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HILARY SPURLING has managed a magnificent thing: two socking great volumes accounting for the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest painters — Henri Matisse. Bizarrely enough, although Matisse died nearly half a century ago in November 1954, no proper attempt at a comprehensive biography has ever been made until now. Picasso, Matisse's most famous contemporary, with no less than a dozen biographies to his name, once said, "All things considered, there is only Matisse." So why the silence with Matisse?
Spurling believes that part of it stems from the generally contemptuous view that the French hold towards the role of biography as a literary genre. Life should be a blank page, and the work should stand alone: this is the common refrain. But the problem with the blank page theory, as Spurling soon found out, was that a life tends to get filled with distortions and misconceptions that get repeated and reinforced as fact. In Matisse's case, the prevailing notion was that his life was too dull and tame to write about; that he lacked intellectual and emotional depth; that because he drew his models in harem pants and see-through tops, he was a male chauvinist pig.
Dedicated to art
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Matisse that Spurling reveals is passionate, generous and driven; a wonderful raconteur and loyal friend, ruled above all by an unswerving dedication to his art. Moreover, he was surrounded by a constellation of powerful, strong women throughout his life: his wife, his daughter, and for the last two decades, his companion and studio manager, the formidable Lydia Delectroskaya. These women gave him the necessary courage and support to face the constant onslaught of criticism that he faced, and were, in fact, paramount to his existence.
To uncover the secrets of Matisse's life, Spurling had to approach her subject very much as Matisse would approach a blank canvas: in as lucid, pertinent, and precise a way as possible; restoring layers of feeling and imagination to Matisse's life, much like he did with paintings. Most of her research was primary, as the only guiding work she could turn to was Alfred Barr's Matisse: His Art and His Public — compiled for the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. The rest she pieced together by way of interviews, public archives and Matisse's mountain of personal correspondences.
Non-entity in home town
When Spurling visited Matisse's home town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, she was shocked to find that people hadn't heard of him; the ones who had, talked of him as the village idiot — le sot Matisse — a man who painted no better than a child. And this was as late as 1991! Spurling, in her search, was constantly confronted by this popular caricature of the French hedonist painter donning a stuffy tweed suit or striped pyjamas going in search of blue skies and odalisques. But the Matisse that emerges from her picking apart and digging, although reticent, is certainly not frivolous.
For Matisse, life and art was about toil, abstinence and discipline. His capacity for work was immense; he demanded hugely from himself and from those around him to work towards self-improvement. He avoided alcohol, took great care with diet and exercise, and rose early every morning so he could see the sun rise. For long periods of his life he lived, work, slept and ate in a single room because he believed solitude was the artist's greatest need. When he travelled, his sole luxury was to have fresh cut flowers all around him.
`In quarantine'
Matisse was uncomfortable about being photographed and questioned and he definitely didn't have the flair for self-promotion, politics or love affairs like Picasso did, but he was also an incredibly humorous man, adorning many of his letters with irreverent, self-mocking cartoons. For Matisse, the ultimate task was to separate the boundaries between art and life and to push beyond — try with pure abstraction to attain some idea of the eternal, the sublime.
"There's nothing to be done but to live in and for yourself, to work towards becoming a real force that can't be dismissed," he wrote to his wife, Amelie, on one of his many travels away. Matisse wrote letters to Amelie on a nearly daily basis, and depended on her support in ways that his contemporaries found fascinating and even slightly amusing. But Matisse also told Amelie before they were married, that while he would always love her, he would always love painting more.
His irritation with human fallibility and his habit of taking possession of people might have made him impossible to live with, but for all his severe stubbornness and monastic zealousness to his vocation, he was also a man who had been, as he complained, "In quarantine" most of his life. Matisse suffered tremendous rejection and hostility and often worried that his work would be forgotten. Even his paper collages of the 1970s and 1980s which are now agreed to be the most extraordinary invention of the 20th Century, were at the time, universally dismissed. Matisse, who was bed-ridden with abdominal cancer when he was making these paper-cut outs, said they enabled him to carve straight into pure colour, using scissors that were swifter and more sensitive than brush or pencil.
Colour his saviour
Ultimately, colour was Matisse's saviour. Spurling writes how Matisse, growing up in Northern France without the luxuries of light and warmth, had already developed an imagination that could transcend the drabness of his everyday life. Then he travelled to Tahiti, Tangiers, Nice — not just in pursuit of the sun, but to cleanse the eye, see the inner landscape in a fresh light. With these travels he was able to unleash the mythical dimensions of his imagination and work towards that union of matter and design which he found so easily in the humble seashell. Those who did understand Matisse's work compared its luminosity to the glowing of a Byzantine enamel, entering a fairytale. Picasso, seeing one of his still life paintings grumbled crossly, "Matisse is a magician ... His colours are uncanny."
In the many years it took to write these books, Spurling says she became an insomniac, as Matisse was. She was haunted by an image from H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man, whose hero finds himself hunted, cornered, and finally bludgeoned to death. Her invisible man suffered in similar ways by a public unable to comprehend the abstraction of the visual language he was creating. With Matisse, it was only through painting that he sought and found the stability, peace and harmony that he never found in his professional or private life.
"If my life were ever to be written down in full," Matisse once said, "It would astonish everybody." Spurling, with these stupendous books, has done just that.
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