Olga Meerson's Henri Matisse, 1911. Oil on canvas. Cover picture: The Fall of Icarus, 1945, paper collage Tristesse du roi, 1952. Cut-paper collage Matisse’s Dance (II), 1910. Oil on canvas

Undoubtedly Matisse

This award-winning biography shows how Henri Matisse's work always managed to speak for itself, writes Gerald Isaaman

Matisse the Master
by Hilary Spurling
Penguin , £25 order this book

ON his deathbed half a century ago, Henri Matisse didn’t make some significant statement about a life packed with humiliation, disappointment and near disaster, not least the failure of his native France to recognise his great art.
Instead, he did what he always did. He drew some portrait sketches, in ballpoint pen, of his faithful model Lydia Delectorskaya. She had come to his bedside with her hair newly washed and wound in a towel turban, her classical profile one that Matisse had captured magnificently so many times. Holding his fourth and final sketch at arm’s length, the old man announced his judgment. “It will do,” he said. And died the next day at his studio in Cimiez, with Lydia and his daughter at his side, and apparently content.
Matisse’s work, as usual, speaks for itself, brave and undaunted, as it still does today, in galleries and homes round the world, in minds and thoughts, in concepts of creativity and originality, and, above all, in the sparkling colour that enshrined Matisse’s fame.
And the poignancy of those dying moments is caught perfectly in Hilary Spurling’s superlative biography of the master. It is a work of some artistry and indeed industry in itself, having taken a decade to research and another five years to complete.
This is the second volume of what, amazingly, is the first ever major work about a giant of the 20th century and, thanks to her unrestricted exposure of caches of letters never seen before, interviewing those who knew him and visiting places as far apart as Le Cateau, in Picardy, where Matisse was born, in 1869, and New York.
Hilary Spurling’s own innate sensitivity played its role too, as did her ability to improve her own understanding of French, the end result being remarkable for its immense detail, insight and information.
It’s as if, sometimes, you were there, watching each brushstroke as Matisse created some fascinating new work thanks to Spurling’s labour of dedication while, at other times, and it is a perverse comment, you wished the two-volume biography was just one.
Spurling’s own career as a literary critic and editor has undoubtedly played a positive part that nothing, literally nothing, has been omitted from this tremendous effort to relate the true story of Matisse’s sad and eventful life.
As the painter said himself: “If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.” That is obviously true, as Spurling provides the enormous evidence of an artist who faced the fire of furious critics yet determinedly changed the concept of what makes wondrous art.
She has removed the stains on the character of a genius who lived so close to the edge of existence that you wonder how he managed to survive. In particular, she has revealed that he wasn’t some awful womaniser who took all his luscious models to bed and indulged in the brothels of Nice during the Nazi occupation. Not true.
What is fascinating for the reader are her tales of his visits to London, not knowing a word of English and disorientated by the thick fog, to create a ballet set and costumes for a Diaghilev production, at the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1920. He managed it in a Covent Garden top floor store, the only way in being up an unlit ladder with only a rope rail to hang on to.
The Leicester Galleries were too the scene of another triumph, his first exhibition here. “These English are mad,” cried Matisse as Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, and what was to become the Bloomsbury Set descended on the show. Arnold Bennett, pillar of the anti-modernist faction, was seduced into buying a drawing, Kenneth (later Lord) Clark, of Civilisation fame, then a 17-year-old schoolboy, declared he was unable to sleep for excitement.
Such was the impact of Matisse. No wonder her biography won this year’s Whitbread prize. Indeed, as Spurling told me at her home in Penn Road, Holloway: “People stood on their chairs and went purple with rage at Matisse’s paintings.
“The English were inoculated first. And that’s why Matisse has always been so admired and appreciated here.”