The Unknown Matisse: Man of the North 1869-1908
Hilary Spurling
Penguin £12.99, pp423
Buy it at BOL
Matisse's paintings are among the best-loved and most joyful artistic creations but unlike other modernists, in particular his younger contemporary, Picasso, he has suffered from a matt and unsexy profile. Indeed, little had been written about him until Spurling's text first appeared in hardback last year.
She gets behind the dull image to present a painter who shaped the visual imagination of the last century by the way he met its horrors. She writes: 'His intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation could be neutralised only by the serene power and stable weight of art.'
As a boy, Matisse dreamed of being an acrobat, knowing that, in fact, he would end up lugging around sacks in the family business. Kidney problems saved him from this fate and he turned to law. He discovered his vocation during a brief spell in hospital when a fellow patient, copying a Swiss landscape from a coloured reproduction, urged him to do the same.
He took off for Paris with a small allowance from his father, but was later made to feel he had brought disgrace on his family. Spurling invigorates the tale with details of his affairs and friends.
It is well known that Matisse suffered public mockery and financial insecurity, but neither the degree of misery he endured nor its different causes have ever been uncovered - until now. For Matisse's harmonies of colour and design were hard won, crafted in the face of discord and disorder. This is truly the 'unknown Matisse'.
