Rediscovering Matisse.(Book Review)

Hilary Spurling Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954. Knopf, 544 pages, $40

Even those of us who have loved Matisse's work since we began to look at paintings as a serious interest could not have suspected what it had cost this great artist to persevere in his vocation. Pleasure had so often been invoked as the key to an understanding of his achievement--"Un nom qui rime avec Nice ... peintre du plaisir, sultan de Riviera, hedoniste raffine," as Pierre Schneider sardonically described this mistaken characterization of Matisse--that it has come as a shock to discover the sheer scale of adversity that had to be endured at almost every stage of his life and work.

It was not only that his paintings were initially denounced as the work of a madman. That was the common fate of a great many modernists, even in the heydey of the School of Paris. Matisse's personal circumstances were also plagued by failing health, failing confidence, and a lack of command in the academic conventions of his medium. (He had never been a good student, and his training was meager.) Even worse, there was his wife's family's financial scandal, which, though neither Matisse nor his wife were at fault, nonetheless cast a pall over the family's name and position.

The bad news comes early in the opening chapter of The Unknown Matisse, the first volume of Hilary Spurling's brilliant biography of the artist, released in 1998, with its stark account of the world into which the artist was born in 1869:

 
   Matisse was born just as the accelerating juggernaut 
   of industrialisation and deforestation 
   reached top speed in his native region. When 
   his family settled on the rue du Chateau, 
   Bohain was already halfway through its transformation 
   from a sleepy weavers' village deep 
   in the ancient forest of the Arrouaise to a 
   modern manufacturing centre with ten 
   thousand clanking looms installed in the town 
   itself and the villages round about. The 
   population, which had taken forty years to 
   grow from two to four thousand before the 
   large-scale installation of steam machinery in 
   the 1860s, would very nearly double again in 
   the twenty years before Matisse finally left 
   home for Paris. 
 
   The town's principal product was textiles, 
   but sugar-beet output also doubled in the first 
   ten years of his life. Energetic clearance meant 
   that the last pockets of surrounding woodland 
   were cut down to make way for beet plants in 
   1869, the year of Matisse's birth. The 
   windmills and belfries that traditionally dotted 
   the rolling flatlands of the Vermandois were 
   far outnumbered in his childhood by the 
   smoking chimneys of sugar refineries and textile 
   mills. The streams on these chalky 
   downs--Bohain stood high in the centre of a 
   triangle marking the sources of the Somme, 
   the Selle and the Escaut--ran with dye and 
   chemical refuse on leaving the towns. The 
   streets of Bohain were slippery with beet pulp 
   in autumn, and the air was rank all winter 
   with the stench of rotting and fermenting 
   beets. Visitors from the outside world in the 
   1870s and 1880s were shocked by the drabness 
   of the town itself, and by the stark, treeless 
   outlines of the newly denuded land round 
   about. "Where I come from, if there is a tree 
   in the way, they root it out because it puts 
   four beets in the shade," Matisse said 
   sombrely.