"If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to
finish, it would amaze everyone," wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to
believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds
worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His
response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from
one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own
conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often
damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his
models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.
Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of
the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows
us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted
access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material
in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation
and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse's attempts to counteract the
violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now
seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse's models, especially
two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia
Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion
in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse's life was
remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite,
whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including
interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.
If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as
Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving
pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass
inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the
real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start
to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.
