Critics have, no doubt, said worse things. But when Louis Vauxcelles
commented that the paintings he saw at a 1905 exhibition resembled a bunch of wild beasts, or "fauves ", he couldn't know that the term would long outlast his derisive meaning. For Henri Matisse, the father of fauvism and one of the greatest fi ures of modern art, truer recognition of his art did, happily, arrive before his death (although the full impact of his work was not understood until some decades later).
His character, on the other hand, remained, at best, a mystery. In this abridged version of her two volume biography, which won the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year, Hilary Spurling sets out to rescue the reputation of a man described by a gossipy contemporary as "the greatest living painter, the greatest living egotist and the greatest living bore".
Matisse was born of mercantile stock in Flanders, a place where, whatever misfortune befell you, you didn't complain. Spurling's scholarly study socks you with the hardship and humiliations he faced, from the moment he picked up a paintbrush to be labelled the village "sot", to his legacy, disparaged by the fervent followers of Picasso. And where Matisse fought adversity, so did those he loved. His illegitimate daughter, Marguerite, battled the lifelong effects of a childhood tracheotomy , and later survived Gestapo torture as a resistance fighter; his wife's family was ruined by the greatest financial scandal of the 19th century. Despite all its tragic fictional incarnations, bohemian Paris has probably never had a more extraordinary narrative.
Plagued by physical ailments, mental anguish and insomnia throughout
his life – one that spanned three wars between France and Germany – Matisse sought peace in his canvases. He championed "an art that won't disturb or trouble people". The irony of his public's violent reaction, horrified by his flagrant use of colours and the path he pioneered towards abstraction, is not lost on Spurling. Neither is the depth of those colours and images themselves, which Spurling describes with a passionate lyricism that complements her academic eye.
