Matisse the Master

This is the second and final volume of the first true biography of Henri Matisse. Until publication of The Unknown Matisse (Volume One), the few facts known about Matisse's life had been distorted by inaccuracy, misunderstanding and glaring gaps.

Hilary Spurling's biography investigates the secret life of Matisse, whose painting shocked and infuriated his contemporaries while paving the way for modern art, and in this second volume, she tells the story of his maturity as an artist and the relationship between his life and art between 1909 and 1954, his glory years.

Extract from Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling

It was the uprush of violence as much as the earthy physicality of the finished work that shocked people. Matisse said he himself took fright, like the Douanier Rousseau, who sometimes had to open a window to let out the elemental force of his own painting. In Dance and Music, Matisse attempted simultaneously to release and contain that force. "At the precise moment when raging bands were milling about in front of his huge canvases, tearing him to pieces and cursing him," wrote Sembat, "he confessed coolly to us: 'What I want is an art of balance, of purity, an art that won't disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting'."

Contemporaries responded to this kind of statement by assuming that Matisse was playing tricks if not actually insane. Even his supporters found it hard at the time to credit that he meant exactly what he said. Matisse's vision of Olympian calm was a strategic war plan: he aimed to achieve the great destructive and constructive goals of modernism by imposing the evenhanded clarity and order of the central French tradition inherited from his masters, Nicolas Poussin and Paul Cézanne.

The effort took everything he had to give. It devoured his days, invaded his dreams at night and put increasing strain on his private life. The family's daily round at Issy was driven by it. This was the obsessive passion that had wrecked Matisse's relationship with Marguerite's mother. He had warned Amelie about it when they first met, explaining bluntly as soon as he realised that their affair was serious: "I love you dearly, mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more."

The terms of their marriage were laid out from the start in a pact Amelie accepted with alacrity. He gave her the cause she had been waiting for from girlhood. As an enthusiastic reader of romantic novels, she chose early role models who gave up all for love: heroic women who faced ferocious opposition and endured grinding privation in order to stand shoulder to shoulder with men battling against impossible odds.

Life with Matisse meant austerity, dedication and self-sacrifice. Pablo Picasso talked in the same terms when he, too, went into training in these for pictorial contests that would test him to the utmost.