With the second volume of John Richardson’s great Picasso biography already out, it was only a matter of time before Matisse (1869–1954) received equal treatment. Hilary Spurling—a London-based theater critic, literary editor, book reviewer, and biographer—has met the challenge admirably with her book, whose fluidity, depth of research, and level of detail are awe-inspiring.[1] While Spurling does not attempt to do the intense pictorial analysis or to make the art historical references that Richardson does—“This book is a biography, not a work of art history,” she writes in the preface—she provides an extraordinarily rich and fascinating context for understanding Matisse’s art and dispels some of the myths and assumptions about him. Her book reveals the “unknown” Matisse, the man not understood by a study of his paintings alone.

The most remarkable thing that comes across about Matisse’s early period is just how undistinguished it was, especially in terms of art. This genius was definitely a late bloomer. His ambitions as a youth were to be a clown or horseman. He was a gifted marksman and violinist. In 1887, Matisse left Bohain in the north of France near the Belgian border, and headed to Paris to study law. He apparently never even set foot in the Louvre during this period. Not until age twenty, while convalescing in a hospital from a hernia (probably caused by carrying heavy grain sacks in his father’s seed store), did Matisse dabble with some paints and discover his true calling in life.

Matisse’s involvement with the world of art did not come easily. His formal training began in Paris in 1891 with a brief period of study under Bouguereau, the famous academic artist. Matisse failed the entrance examination at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but managed to enter through the back door; the great Symbolist Gustave Moreau was a new teacher who accepted students regardless of their examination results. Matisse studied for six important years with Moreau, an unconventional teacher who raised suspicion among his colleagues. “[Moreau] planted question marks in our minds,” Matisse later recounted. Goya’s paintings were also particularly influential: “I believed I would never be able to paint because I didn’t paint like the others. Then I saw Goya at Lille. That was when I understood that art could be a language; I thought that I could become a painter.” Soon afterwards, the Louvre became his true school. “I was a student of the galleries of the Louvre,” he asserted. But, Matisse was still taking art classes at age thirty, at the Académie Julian where he was heckled by the younger students as an out-of-place old timer. Indeed, it appears that few people had high hopes or expectations for Matisse. According to Spurling’s account, people in his town thought he was an imbecile, a failure who was confirming everyone’s worst fears. Matisse himself was plagued by self-doubts and a lack of confidence exacerbated by his father’s concerns about his abilities. Matisse did not have visions of grandeur, only hopes of eking out a living. His career as an artist was not truly launched until 1905, when he was thirty-five years old.

Spurling provides heart-wrenching accounts of the grinding, debilitating poverty that Matisse endured for the first fifteen years of his career. His wife Amélie and daughter Marguerite would scrape paint off canvases so that he could reuse them. This is a revelation, for it is at odds with our image of Matisse as a well-dressed and comfortable looking bourgeois gentleman who was headed for a career in law. This information opens Matisse’s art up to new interpretations. Rather than seeming like rich, appealing reflections of a privileged life—as in Matisse’s legendary quote where art is meant to be “something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue”—his art can now seem to be as escapist as that of his anarchist NeoImpressionist artist friends Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce.

Spurling reveals that Matisse’s greatest contribution to art—his celebration of color as an expressive force independent of a descriptive function—developed not from his formal training but from his personal life. The artist came from a drab city in the north, characterized by gray skies. His only exposure to color and light came in the rich textiles produced in his region. A turning point in Matisse’s art came during his stays on Belle-Ile-en-Mer in Brittany during the summers of 1895–1897. Particularly important to Matisse was an Australian painter, John Peter Russell, who ran an art colony on the island that owed a great deal to the theories of van Gogh, his late friend and former classmate. Matisse credited Russell with introducing him to the Impressionists’ theories of light and color, especially to the contributions of Monet. Russell’s name comes up frequently in studies of the period, but without much information. Happily, Spurling has uncovered a significant amount of interesting material on this fascinating figure. A color reproduction in the book of one of Russell’s paintings shows him to be an artist of great talent and, several years before the founding of the movement by Matisse, a definite Fauvist in his strong use of expressionist color.

Early in 1897, before his third and last summer on Belle-Ile-en-Mer, Matisse met Camille Pissarro. A great friend, teacher and mentor to the Impressionists, he was also, it is interesting to see, an important influence on the young Matisse. Pissarro encouraged the younger artist and introduced him to actual works by the Impressionists, particularly his own and those of Monet. Matisse’s interest in light and color intensified after his marriage to Amélie Parayre, a woman of Corsican heritage from southwestern France. Their wedding trip to Corsica in February 1898 forever changed his life because of the bright sun and colors that he discovered there. The art collector Pierre Lévy later said that Matisse told him that Fauvism actually started in Corsica. Matisse credited his wife with introducing him to the south. It was not until the summer— now legendary—he spent at St. Tropez in 1904 with Signac, however, that Matisse finally dedicated himself to the celebration of color.

Indeed, his career was subject to major fits and starts. Just when Matisse seems to have made breakthroughs and started to explore color and light in earnest in Belle-Ile-en-Mer and Corsica, he was knocked off track and fell into his “dark period” (1902–03). He was derailed, Spurling posits, by an international scandal she discovered involving his in-laws, Catherine and Armand Parayre. The tragedy traumatized the close-knit family. The Parayres were confidantes and supporters of Frédéric Humbert, a député, and his wife Thérèse, who perpetrated a major financial scam that imperiled the government and banking system and led to many suicides. This drama played out on the front pages of the newspapers. The Parayres were implicated because of their close connection to the perpetrators. In addition to being profoundly embarrassed by their longstanding friendship with the thieves, the Parayres quickly descended from a life of wealth, privilege, and status to being penniless social outcasts. For his part, Matisse went from being respected and admired in his village for having married well to being considered, once again, an embarrassment to his family and neighbors. Although an indirect participant in this event, Matisse suffered greatly; he had health problems and essentially stopped working for two years. The result, one could argue, is that the twentieth-century art revolution did not start on time but had to wait a couple of years.

Spurling also contributes to the discussion about the great rivalry between Matisse and Picasso. Older by twelve years and the first to make a big splash in Paris, Matisse was the one initially being emulated. Spurling suggests that Picasso’s curious decision to adopt a thirteen-year-old girl in 1907, when he was still living in an artist’s studio at the Bateau Lavoir, could have been influenced by the fact that Matisse had a thirteen-year-old daughter. And cannot Picasso’s move away from the color of the Blue and Rose periods towards the somber canvases of analytic Cubism be read as a reaction against Matisse the great colorist? Picasso may not have wanted to be seen as one of Matisse’s many followers. For Picasso, art was definitely not meant to be like a good armchair. The Picasso-Matisse rivalry is a subject of endless fascination, and will be explored in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002 in which other tidbits will likely emerge.

The book provides a rich array of new information that allows us to understand the making of this great artist: for example, regional politics in the nineteenth century, art training in the French provinces, and details about Matisse’s friends and mentors who have faded into oblivion. They share equal attention with the already-known supporters of his art, including the American collectors Michael, Sarah, Leo, and Gertrude Stein and the Russian Sergei Schoukine. Although no mention is made of future volumes in the preface or on the dust jacket, this book is in fact the first of a multi-volume biography. One can only wait with great anticipation for the next volume and for Spurling’s discussion of Matisse’s involvement in the heady “Banquet Years” of Paris immediately before the Great War.

Notes
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The Unknown Matisse A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869–1908, by Hilary Spurling; Alfred A. Knopf, 528 pages, $28. Go back to the text.