great genius; Hilary Spurling's "Matisse the Master" breaks new ground.(Book Review)

Byline: Robert Hughes

Although Matisse died in 1954, half a century ago, nobody until now has written his life. There was nothing for the English historian Hilary Spurling to compete against, and now that her second volume, Matisse the Master (Knopf), is out, it is hard to imagine how her work could be bettered. It has the large, encompassing fascination of certain masterpieces of literary biography: Richard Ellman on James Joyce, for instance, or George Painter on Marcel Proust. Spurling, who has never before written a book about a visual artist, has risen to the greatness and difficulty of her subject and produced that authentic rarity, a real work of art whose theme is other works of art: what goes into their making, what they demand of the maker, what the maker demands of them and of those close to him, how they affect others-the whole tragicomedy of creation at its highest level.

There are some excellent writings on Matisse's art, by such people as Dominique Fourcade and Jack Flam. But on the life, not much, despite the enormous amounts of source material-such as the archive of Matisse's letters to his wife, Amelie-which remained largely unconsulted. It has been generally assumed that Matisse the man was a pompous bourgeois, a champion bore. Worse, that his existence was without ups and downs, devoid of colorful tensions: Having famously said that he wanted his art to act like an easy chair for tired businessmen, he is credited with living a stress-free and thus superficial life. Worse still, that his sexual politics were not up to snuff; there is an image of Matisse in the 1920s, the make-believe pasha of the Cote d'Azur, sexually exploiting all those models in harem pants and doing it with rather lax, pretty pictures that never equal his achievements before 1918. And worst of all, he may-shhh-have indulged in collaboration-for-convenience with the occupying Nazis on the Cote d'Azur in the forties.

As Spurling conclusively shows, there is no basis for any of this. It is a myth, constructed by political activists who disliked Matisse-mostly Surrealists and their supporting writers, and some of the Picasso claque. Its object was to strip him of avant-garde credentials, and there is no shortage of people who believe it even today. Matisse's relations with his models, who were as utterly essential to him as Renoir's or Courbet's were to them-he could never just "make up" a body as Picasso did, he always had to see something, someone, in front of him, which is actually one of the strengths of his work-was professional, correct, humanely tender, and generally chaste. But the supposed Olympian complacency turns out to be a total misreading of Matisse's character. He fussed and agonized over his work, and over his family life as well. "His body," Spurling points out, "always reacted violently to anything that came between him and painting, starting with the mysterious back pains that crippled him as a teenager whenever his father mentioned alternative careers." Cramps attacked his innards like knives, he was plagued by nosebleeds, he did everything but break out in the stigmata. It sounds more like Job on his dunghill than the Rubens of Nice. Picasso inflicted pain on others, but Matisse inflicted it on himself.

Contrary to general belief, his success during his own lifetime was not enormous. He had the great problem that most of his work simply vanished: the sublime pre-1917 paintings he did for the Russian collectors Schukine and Morosov were sequestered by the Stalinist cultural system, while the pictures amassed by Dr. Barnes in Philadelphia, a crazed bully of a man with an eagle eye, were never lent to shows while he was alive. Conservative French officialdom in the thirties, partly because he himself had furiously attacked the Beaux Arts system, ...