The Unknown Matisse

"I think this is an extraordinary biography – the story of a late bloomer whose career only really takes off when he’s 35. It interests me as a professional historian because it puts its finger on the cross-currents of culture in this period. As I mentioned earlier, on the one hand we see in France the continued preoccupation with the old regime, which was so evident in the massive acclaim for a play like Cyrano de Bergerac . On the other, there were these avant-garde artists like Matisse who would break with the form of many classical conventions. What Matisse shows is the development of a modernist aesthetic. It’s also a very complicated one. His modernism is in some sense deeply affected by industrialisation. He comes from a textile town in Flanders and throughout his life he would collect fabric and use its exuberant colours and textures to inspire his art – that’s why the whole decorative side of Matisse is so important. He is also a northerner who initially only painted with palettes of browns, but is transformed by his wife’s Corsican heritage and his first trips to the light of the south where he considered colour anew. He develops a new colour aesthetic in Fauvism – which is the French word for “wild beast” and describes the iconoclasm of some of his works in the first decade of the 20th century. But it wasn’t just for the sake of breaking the rules: He used colour as a means of expressing his own subjectivity, and his paintings proved so powerful because of the emotion they seemed to convey. So modernism emerges in the midst of the long summer of the Belle Epoque . The conventional view is that modernism was a complete break with the past. But I would insist – and I think that this biography shows it beautifully – that a modernist like Matisse builds on older traditions, especially in content if not in form. Like many other artists of this period, he is also influenced by empire and made paintings of women from North Africa in a very similar way to 19th century realists. What is also interesting about Matisse is that he becomes self-consciously decorative. He didn’t necessarily want to disturb, but rather wanted a modern art form “as comfortable as an armchair”. That was very different from the view of art of his great rival Picasso . It’s interesting to reflect on how many different types there were in the melting pot of modernist aesthetics – they were not all intent on jarring sensibilities. That’s why I think this book is so wonderful. Not because it’s just an art history drooling over the beauty of the artworks of Matisse – although she does really appreciate his art – but because Spurling understands these many different cultural elements and also the intensity of his life – his insomnia, passions and fears – and how they all contributed to his artistic output."