Hilary Spurling - The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908

Matisse, My Portrait, 1900

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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THE UNKNOWN MATISSE

A thrilling luminous voyage into the interior of a mans mind
Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, Best Biographies of the Year

Spurling brushes aside all our preconceptions about the painter to reveal a personality and a personal history none of us had guessed at. A triumph of research and writing, a work of literature worthy of its subject
Richard Dorment, New York Review of Books

Spurling contrives not only to make the man Matisse vivid and likeable but to make us appreciate the artist almost from within. We pulse with his excitement, and are tense with his determination
Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday

A marvellous piece of work and a major achievement by any standards
John Golding

Throws new light on Matisse, brilliantly illuminating the years up to 1908, during which he gradually became the one painter Picasso couldnt ignore
William Feaver, The Times Educational Supplement

Miraculous the best Life of a painter that I have read
Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph

A LIFE OF HENRI MATISSE : VOLUME ONE , 18691908

HilarySpurling

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This book is dedicated to the memory
of its heroine, Amlie Nolie Matisse

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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1998

First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1998

Published in Penguin Books 2000

Copyright Hilary Spurling, 1998

Copyright Succession H. Matisse/DACS London, 1998 for all works by Henri Matisse

Copyright Succession Picasso/DACS London, 1998 for all works by Pablo Picasso

Copyright ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 1998, for all works by Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Camoin, Andr Derain, Jules Flandrin, Maximilien Luce, Aristide Maillol, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Jean Puy, Paul Signac

Copyright 1998 Les Hritiers Matisse for all photographs from Archives Matisse, Paris

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.

The publishers will be glad to correct any errors or omissions in future editions.

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193490-7

AMP: Archives Matisse, Paris

This book is a biography, not a work of art history, and I have constructed it along lines laid down by its subject. No one has described how to paint a portrait more clearly or succinctly than Henri Matisse. He insisted on accuracy, maintaining at the same time that the meticulous reproduction of external detail could never provide more than a starting point. Success or failure at a deeper level was a matter of contemplation, concentration, the force and quality of attention focussed on a subject. Matisse said that nothing should be distorted or suppressed. Approximations did not interest him. Anyone attempting a portrait should above all approach the subject without preconceptions.

Seven years ago, I set out to make a portrait of Matisse himself, using words as a medium. If the result contains surprising revelations, they come from sticking as closely as I could to Matisses own directions. He said his portraits uncovered much that he could not have suspected at the start. To sum up, I work without a theory. I am aware primarily of the forces involved, and find myself driven forward by an idea which I can really only grasp little by little as it grows with the picture.

Matisse was born in 1869 in northern France and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border, on the drab, cold, wet beet fields of French Flanders. The same area, culturally and geographically speaking, had produced Vincent van Gogh sixteen years before. Matisse spent his childhood among the smoking factory chimneys of a countryside still in the grip of brutal and convulsive industrialisation. The last remnants of the great forest that had once surrounded Bohain were chopped down in the year of his birth. Prussian armies poured across these flatlands in 1871, winning a bloody and decisive victory over the French at St-Quentin (where the young Henri later went to school) within a month of his first birthday. He spent his first twenty-one yearsa quarter of his lifein this treeless industrial landscape under dour northern skies, showing no apparent interest in painting and envisaging little or no possibility of escape from a future as a wholesale seed-merchant, like his father. More than half a century later, it still seemed to him in retrospect as if he had spent those years in prison.

On one level, his whole life may be construed as a flight towards the brilliant light, the singing colours and apparently effortless freedom of his painting. His career was punctuated almost to the end by uprootings and departures, journeying always southwards. The open window remains a constant motif, sometimes an ambiguous metaphor, in his work. The soaring imagination and the constraints of reality; the artist simultaneously freed by and chained to his easel; discipline and sensuality; imprisonment and releaseall these themes run right through Matisses work from the first small, dark, powerful and constricted interiors of the 1890s to the final dazzling synthesis of liberated colour in the great cut-paper or stained-glass constructions of the 1950s.