Henri Matisse the Master

'Matisse the Master' by Hilary Spurling. Penguin Books, 512 pages.


    You have to like modern art to enjoy the work of the French painter Henri Matisse. But if you like modern art then Matisse is the artist for you. From about 1900 to his last years in the mid-1950's, he turned out one great painting after another.
     Only the Spaniard  Pablo Picasso could at times produce work that equalled Matisse's.
     Matisse was a great colourist. His subjects of  female nudes, and rooms full of coloured rugs, curtains and walls, usher the viewer into a world of enchantment. He must have had a wonderful life, I thought, when I first saw his work. This wasn't true at all.
     Hilary Spurling's second volume on Matisse shows him living a life full of troubles. "Matisse was never easy to live with,"writes Spurling. "He could be almost unbearable at close quarters." Matisse's wife, born Amelie Paraye, gave her husband all her support and then some. But she and he had children who had problems. Their daughter Marguerite, breathed through a damaged windpipe. Only several operations kept her alive.
      Pierre Matisse, one of the couple's two sons, married a Corsican woman, who didn't get on with her new husband. Pierre fled to the United States, scared of being killed by his outraged in-laws. Later Henri and Amelie split up.
     Matisse was constantly plaged by ill-health. In his 60's he had a colostomy to cure his stomach problems. He told people he wasn't sick but wounded. "I'm like someone hit by a shell blast," he said, "with the wasll of his stomach blown away."
     In his lifetime, German troops thrice invaded France. The third time around in 1940, Nazi troops conquered France and occupied it until 1945. His daughter Marguerite joined the French Resistance. She was captured by the Nazis and tortured. But luckily she survived.
      Through all of this, Matisse went on living and kept turning out some beautiful work. Unable to paint in his last years he cut out painted paper and created some lovely abstract and figurative works. When he died in 1954, he was rightly hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest artists.
    Hilary Spurling has written a geat book on this great artist.