Customer Reviews

Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse. Hilary Spurling (v. 2)

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The life of Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse is a remarkable one - author Hilary Sprung has spent years in careful and caring research to bring to life in pages this master of painting. Matisse is one of the giants of modern art; Picasso long considered him is only true rival. As the title of this volume indicates (volume 2 of a set, the first one published a few years ago dealing with the first 40 years of Matisse's life), he is noted for bold and original use of colour in his paintings. His influences include Van Gogh, Gaugain and Cézanne, so how could he not be so directed?

In a time when the world's attention is focused upon New Orleans, it is worthwhile to mention Matisse's own connection, with his work 'Jazz', a title inspired by the improvisational, free-and-easy style that Jazz musicians performed in response to the world around them. This was done during a period of severe illness, and Matisse used a collage method for this work because he was too weak to paint.

This volume follows Matisse from his maturity as an artist to the time of his death. The decline of the Fauvist movement did not hurt Matisse, whose productivity continued in Paris and the Riviera. Spurling includes his artistic life, his personal and family life, as well as his relationships with other artists and professionals in her sweeping narrative.

Spurling had generous access to Matisse's letters and private papers - he devoted nearly an hour a day at some points in his life to carrying on correspondence, and much of this has been preserved. Spurling also conducted countless hours of interviews with people, and was able to bring this large mass of material together in an entertaining and inspiring way. Matisse himself once commented that if the truth of his life were written down, it would astonish people, and this biography helps to validate that claim.

There are beautiful colour plates here, in addition to well over a hundred black-and-white images scattered throughout the text. If I had one wish for this two-volume set, it would be the inclusion of more colour - there is something ironic and a bit depressing to see Matisse in black and white!

A glorious book.

Those of us who live today are spoiled in one sense that we don't realize: We can see Matisse's work on display and appreciate its evolution. That wasn't possible until just the last few decades. Until then, many of his most powerful works were locked up in the Soviet system and not on display or were in the hands of reclusive collectors.

That's an important point to remember when you wonder why Picasso has gotten so much more attention than Matisse, you could always see Picasso's work and Picasso courted attention.

Matisse, by comparison, found that it took all of his energies just to create art. There was very little time left over for his family and the rest of the world. He also wasn't inclined to seek out those who could explain and defend his work. As a result, he was widely misunderstood and underappreciated during his lifetime. This book corrects many of those problems.

Of particularly interest is the finding that although Matisse spent his life painting voluptuous nudes, he didn't indulge in having sexual relations with his models. Rather he used the sexual tension the models created in him to help inspire a better work. The models did become, ultimately, the undoing of his marriage . . . but not for the reasons you expect.

As fascinating as he is as an artist, he even more interesting as a creative person and head of a family. Matisse saw his family's role as being there to serve art. Although in a crisis, he would show up to encourage and aid family members and friends . . . usually he was off painting or sculpting by himself in sunnier climes. The rest of the time, they were doing administrative tasks, critiquing the works, staying out of his way and helping him enjoy a tranquil existence.

Anyone who wants a deeper appreciation of Matisse's work will learn from this volume. Although the book would have been better with more color plates, the pages are generously illustrated with black and white reproductions to give you a sense of his focus and development.

For artists, the book's many insights into the pros and cons of relationships with collectors and dealers will make the volume a "must have" item.

I didn't know the background of many of his best works, such as Jazz. It was a pleasure to better understand why he did them.

In particular, you will come away with a new appreciation for Matisse's use of color to capture emotion. Think of The Red Studio and the Conversation.

I seldom savor biographies as much as I did this one. I plan to go back now and read the first volume in the series, The Unknown Matisse.

Ms. Spurling's extensive use of Matisse's letters (and especially reproducing the funny little cartoons he liked to put in them) made the book a special joy.

Nice work, Ms. Spurling!

This is the best art history I have read. Spurling sponsors no theories, but reports the exhaustively researched facts with a real storyteller's grace. She brings the times and characters to life.More really is more, in her hands. Irresistible.

"Artists are like plants whose growth in the thickets of the jungle depends on the air they breathe, and the mud or stones among which they grow by chance and without choice." Matisse's words coupled with his life as proof of what van Gogh said about the love of art making one lose real love make the reader feel the pain, the joy and the rich colours of his life all that much more. He made us understand.

Hilary Spurling's masterpiece (savoured by me for endless months, days and hours) has been an extraordinary experience I never wanted to end - both volumes. And now her biography is all locked in my mind - hopefully, to be recalled again and again in painting after painting and life experience after love experience - thanks to all the years of her hard work and research.

I am now filled with the colours of the Master - just as he'd installed 'The Tree of Life' in "a change of key that brought an extraordinary clarity, serenity and stillness to the music of the chapel." If the student of art, the student of life might only read pp. 455-456, he/she would be amazed at one whose talents were mocked ("any child could paint better than Matisse." ... "...his inventions seemed not simply monstrous but blasphemous as well.") and would ache to have had the chance to be a simple fly on the wall in those last years of his life when the many energies swirled about his taxi beds and many wond'rous studios ever-changing, metamorphosing, revealing and displaying, nurturing, teaching... revolutionary!

Let us not forgot his bedrocks - the women who made all his successes possible are miraculous and astonishing... Lydia, Matisse's remarkable genius manager (we should all be so lucky to know such a dynamo); Amelie, his extraordinary wife and her 'nine lives'; of course, Marguerite, his daughter, whose amazing vitality and strength of character resounds on almost every page of his life story; she was one (by her great courage) who humbled him more than anyone else could; and the countless models and interns...

As a side note... I remember in January 2006 when Hilary Spurling "scooped one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards," Whitbread Book of the Year prize, just as the big scandal exploded about Oprah's book club "author" protégé/scam artist James Frey was exposed. I thought to myself, "There is still a god!" What kind of mindless person would turn to Oprah for advice on what to read in the first place?! What does she know about literature?

I am humbled at Hilary Spurling's great accomplishment and would love to meet her one day so I could sing her the song I wrote about Matisse and the story of his blue butterfly. [...]

"The blue of that butterfly and Cezanne

made you more of a spiritual man."

Those two rival giants of 20th century avant-garde art, Picasso and Matisse - whose work was so publicly antithetical - privately "drew closer than ever before" in the last decade of Matisse's life. "They swapped notes and compared problems," writes Hilary Spurling in her mammoth and compelling, revelatory Matisse the Master.

This is the second and final volume of her biography of this extraordinary French artist, covering the years 1909 to 1954. Half a century after his death, the first biography of Matisse is complete. Matisse will never seem quite the same again.

"Picasso complained," she goes on, "about the effortless, inborn sense of beauty, balance and proportion against which he had fought savagely all his life, Matisse lamented the lack of natural facility that had made his entire career a relentless uphill struggle."

And yet facility, not to mention frivolity, superficiality, decorativeness, childish incompetence, and irrelevance were too often the accusations Matisse suffered from contemporaries, particularly in the 1920s and 30's.

Other writers have certainly recognized his "uphill struggle," the exhaustive complexities that assailed him as he aimed at purity, serenity, and simplicity in his luminous art. But the very scale and detail of this biography really conveys the relentlessness of this struggle. Even in his crowning achievement, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence in southern France, his habitual practice of abandoning work when it did not measure up and of starting over again until it did, had not left him. The Dominican brother who had first stimulated the project "was astonished, even appalled by the way Matisse worked, especially by how calmly he accepted setbacks." Spurling is clear that it is a simplistic mistake to be fooled by the apparent ease or spontaneity of his paintings, drawings, and paper cut-outs into thinking them facile or shallow.

In fact, her biography repeatedly emphasizes the wide discrepancies between Matisse's reputation and the actuality as revealed in the wealth of letters and documentary evidence available to her through the cooperation of Matisse's heirs. Again and again his new work, when first seen in public, sparked outrage. This, he believed, was the result of being a truly questing artist inventing a "new language," an artist always "fifty years ahead of his time."

The "fauve" phase of his work, and then the great paintings "Dance" and "Music" painted for the remarkable Russian collector Shchukin, shocked and dismayed; yet shock was hardly his prime motivation.

Matisse was never a "half-measure" artist. There was, by his own admission, particularly at the outset of a new work, a kind of violence that called for sublimation. Yet his distress was extreme when work that was for him the height of ecstasy or extravagant joy, work that had liberated brilliant color and expressed light as never before, caused furious and humiliating dismissal.

In another respect, his personal appearance often resembled that of an insurance salesman - bespectacled and sober-suited - and was so different from his art that some unperceptive people (notably in the English "Bloomsbury" literary set) failed to see beyond the mask and thought him bourgeois and pompous. Spurling's testimony frequently shows him to have been neither.

This biography presents much more than a glimpse behind the scenes. It discloses a ruthlessly dedicated career, a massive determination, and, by giving flesh to the hidden shadows of the man, it provokes a stimulatingly fresh look at his art. The vagaries and traumas of his life and times, however idealistic and protective might be the hermetic nature of his working practice, are nevertheless shown to have had a surprisingly direct bearing on its mood and character. Paintings made during World War I in particular can now be seen to have a stringent, grim stature somehow not evident before.

In his lifetime, France was invaded three times by the Germans. War horrified Matisse and he was deeply tortured by his incapacity to fight. Sometimes he managed to pull up his drawbridge and contribute to the war effort by simply continuing to work. Spurling settles not a few myths about him, one of which was that in World War II he indulged himself in the fleshpots of Nice. This absolute myth is not unconnected with another - that he sexually exploited his many models. Spurling presents evidence that suggests that instead he was scrupulous in observing the propriety of the artist-model relationship. His models often expressed appreciation.

This book is not only about Matisse, but also looks penetratingly into the lives of his family, friends, and assistants - notably his wife, his daughter, and his last assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya. These three women, whose lives were overwhelmed in their fierce dedication to the artist, were heroic. After many years, the first two apparently needed to distance themselves from the domination; Matisse was no exception to the tendency of "great" artists to be overweeningly egocentric - making the most impossible demands on others because they also never hesitate to make impossible demands on themselves.

Yet Matisse also had a counterbalancing generosity and sensitivity toward others. Spurling, writing about the exactions he imposed on his assistants as the Vence chapel exhaustingly took shape, observes: "Even those who most bitterly resented his exactions at the time agreed afterwards that Matisse took much but gave more." And the reader never doubts that what he gave to posterity in his art was incalculably rich.

The completion of a two-volume, chronological biography on one of the last century's most significant artists. Hilary Spurling writes with deep understanding and knowledge of Henri Matisse, his family, close helpers and models, and his color driven art.

I found the author's treatment of key collectors to be of special interest, from the Russian Shchukin to Baltimore's Etta Cone. And the near mad Dr. Barnes of Merion, Pennsylvania.

As a result of unconnected events -- the Russian revolution, the Nazi regime's hatred of modern art, and Dr. Barnes' seclusion of his vast collection -- many of Matisse's most important works were not available to the public and hence his full artistic record was generally unknown for many years.

While I respect that this was a biography (it ends with the subject's death in 1954), an afterward on the state of Matisse's current reputation in the world of art would have been welcomed.

Such a wonderful book to read! After seeing his works of art at the museums in New York (MET - MOMA); in Maryland (BMA); and in California (San Francisco), it is a joy to the human spirit to read this biography. This book offers the reader all the underlying events contributing to each of his major works of art. It allows us to better appreciate his extreme and intense efforts to create; it allows us to recognize his unquestionable courage to be himself while many of the art world turned away from him; and one will learn of his life long love of the natural world (birds and plants) and his view of the importance of the spirit of man. Further, this book allows the reader to see his social frustration; one can learn of his powerful drive (so red hot) to create, and one will see in words how he commanded everyone around him to assist him in his zeal to achieve his personal best in art. As the book denotes towards the end even Picasso, the great competitor, stated in a discussion of one of Matisse's later works (the Chapel in Nice): 'Only Matisse could do this!' Read to learn, read to know, and read to be more deeply passionate in love with Matisse as I am!

Superb! Not only one of the best biographies I've read, it get's into the mind of the artist. This is not an easy thing to do. I read it as I would a novel, it was very hard to put down.

Spurling does a superb job of completing her insightful and beautifully written biography of Matisse. She not only feels for him and the great struggles he endured in creating his art but also is sympathetic to the feelings and sacrifices of his family in helping him to achieve all that he did.

As with the other reviewers, I was captivated by this book, and its predecessor. It now can stand beside John Richardson's monumental Picasso (still unfinished). Perhaps the most astonishing thing is the women who formed his total long-suffering support group. My only disappointment with the book is that one is desperate to find out about the afterlives of his wife, Olga Meerson, and Lydia Delectorskaya. (Sequel?)

Of course the other problem is that one comes away still not knowing what Matisse thought he was up to. He is still a complete mystery: what was it that drove him so much, and kept him in such agony? What was he looking for in his art? Everything he says about it is hardly helpful.