Chapter One
1909: Paris, Cassis and Cavalière
Returning from Berlin to Paris in January 1909, Henri Matisse got
off the train partway to visit one of his few German supporters. He
had just said good-bye to his majestic Harmony in Red, leaving it
behind in a gallery in Berlin, where people said his latest
paintings were senseless, shameless, infantile monstrosities or sick
and dangerous messages from a madhouse. The French felt much the
same. Harmony-the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any
other-was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries.
His host at Hagen, a few miles along the Ruhr from Essen, was the
collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had already bought five works from
Matisse and was about to commission a sixth. Osthaus insisted on
showing off his latest acquisition, a mosaic design installed in a
modern crematorium newly built on an industrial waste site. When
they entered the building on a cold, grey, rainy Sunday afternoon
they found an organ playing softly in the gloom and a coffin sinking
into the ground in front of them. Tired, depressed and deeply shaken
by what had happened in Berlin, Matisse lost his usual composure and
let out a scream: “My God, a dead body!”
Osthaus explained that the body was a fake, part of a public
relations exercise put on to counter the local workers’ instinctive
mistrust of cremation. But Matisse could not forget it, and often
marvelled afterwards at the strange way Germans chose to amuse them
on a Sunday afternoon. He had a second shock when he got home and
received a parcel from Germany containing what looked like a
gigantic funeral wreath. In fact, it was a wreath of bays posted by
a young American admirer, Thomas Whittemore of Tufts College, to
console Matisse for the failure of his Berlin show. Trying to
lighten her husband’s nervous tension, Mme Matisse tasted a bay leaf
(“Think how good it will be in soup”), and said brightly that the
wreath’s red bow would make a hair ribbon for their
fourteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite. “But I’m not dead yet,”
Matisse said grimly.
The work Matisse stopped off to see in Hagen was his own Nymph and
Satyr. It was a relatively conventional set of three ceramic panels
showing a stocky muscular nymph doing a stamping dance, then falling
asleep and being tentatively approached by a hairy, hopeful satyr
enclosed in a frieze of grapes and vine leaves. In January 1909,
Matisse had recently completed an oil painting of the same subject
(colour fig. 1). This time the satyr (who had been more of a tame
faun on Osthaus’s glazed tiles) started out with a little beard and
pointy ears, but turned into something far more violent and raw.
Matisse’s final version is unequivocally human: a clumsy, graceless,
lustful male advancing purposefully on a naked female huddled with
her back turned at his feet. The man’s pink, thinly painted flesh is
outlined in red, the colour of arousal. So is the woman’s, but every
line of her expressive body-bent head, drooping breasts, collapsing
limbs-suggests exhaustion, helpless weakness and enforced surrender.
This is the mood of Paul Cézanne’s The Abduction (or The Rape),
where another masterful naked man carries off another pale, limp,
fleshy female. The fierce erotic charge in both paintings is
reinforced by harsh colour and rough handling. In Matisse’s case,
the texture of the paint was itself an outrage. The choppy stabbing
brushstrokes, the landscape’s crude contours filled with flat
scrubby green, the blurry patches round the man’s head, crotch, left
hand and right knee, all convey extreme disturbance. His picture,
like Cézanne’s, is both personal and symbolic. Both suggest an image
spurting up from some deep, probably unconscious level of the
imagination on a tide of bitterness and rage. Matisse’s satyr looks
as if he means to strangle his victim with his outsize red hands.
Matisse himself said that this was how he always felt before he
began a painting.
For him each painting was a rape. “Whose rape?” he asked, startling
his questioner (perhaps also himself) with the brutal image that
surfaced in his mind during an interview that took place more than
three decades after he painted Nymph and Satyr: “A rape of myself,
of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic
object.” He seems to have meant that he relied on his female models
to arouse feelings that he could convert to fuel the work in hand.
He confronted whatever underlay that process head on in Nymph and
Satyr. The displaced emotion here is at least in part aesthetic. The
last time Matisse put classical nymphs into a picture was in 1904 in
Luxe, calme ET volupté, an uneasy experimental composition that led
directly to the explosive canvases dismissed by most people the year
after as the work of a wild beast, or Fauve. In the winter of
1908-9, Matisse was once again grappling with, and violating, the
ancient canons of a debased classical tradition in a canvas that
commits pictorial and depicts sexual rape.
This coarse, powerful, primitive painting was earmarked for the
Russian collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a man in process of
committing himself as unreservedly as Matisse to liberating painting
from the academic tyranny of Beaux-Arts aesthetics. Shchukin was an
inordinately successful textile manufacturer with a patchy education
and no academic training. People dismissed him, in both Paris and
Moscow, as gullible and uncouth, an ignorant boyar who made no
attempt to cultivate the refinement that enabled other Moscow
merchants to build up more serious art collections. It was Shchukin
who had commissioned the Harmony in Red currently hanging in Paul
Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin. Shchukin came to see it there and,
unlike the German art world, was powerfully impressed. On 9 January
he followed Matisse to Paris to inspect work in hand in the studio,
including the Nymph and Satyr.
Shchukin took delivery of six Matisse paintings in the month after
he got back to Moscow. The painter said that in some ways he came to
dread the visits of this particular collector because of his
unerring knack for picking out the latest breakthrough canvas and
carrying it off, sometimes with the paint still wet. Shchukin
grasped at once that Nymph and Satyr was an affront to decency and
morals, which only increased his impatience to possess it. This new
canvas could not easily be displayed in mixed company, let alone in
public. It was quite different from the sexy pictures other men kept
behind locked doors in their private rooms and cabinets. Its secret
kick for a subversive like Shchukin was precisely that it violated
every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public
nudes that filled the Paris salons.
The contemporary French incarnation of those precepts in the eyes of
fashionable Moscow was Maurice Denis. Shchukin himself owned several
pictures by Denis, who had once embodied the last word in
sophistication for him, too. In January 1909, Denis was making waves
in Moscow. He had come to install his latest work in the home of
another Moscow merchant, Ivan Abramovich Morozov (who had also made
a fortune out of textiles). Morozov, who was Shchukin’s close friend
and only Russian rival in the field of modern art, had ordered seven
huge painted panels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche for his
music room.
Denis pictured Cupid as a plump, life-size, naked youth wearing
wings to match his predominant colour scheme of pink, green and
blue. His Psyche is a solid girl with cushiony breasts, buttocks and
hips. The couple’s sturdy build adds to the absurdity of their
chaste embrace as they dangle cheek to cheek in midair with nothing
touching below the waist. The décor of Cupid’s palace with its
garden ornaments, mauve silk drapes and floral sprays is more
reminiscent of an expensive modern florist than of ancient Greece.
This is seduction with any hint of desire or danger airbrushed out.
It went down well on its first showing at the Paris Autumn Salon,
and it made an even bigger splash in Moscow. So much so that
Morozov, who was thinking of hiring Matisse to decorate his dining
room, dropped the idea in favour of commissioning six more panels
from Denis.
It was Shchukin instead who commissioned wall paintings from
Matisse. The painter never forgot the lunch at the Restaurant Larue
in Paris where the pair of them together hatched a plan to end all
blue-pink-and-green decorative schemes peopled with dancing nymphs
and piping fauns. Matisse’s Dance and Music grew from their
conversation at this lunch. “I hope that when they see your
decorations, the tumult of admiring cries to be heard at present
will die down a little,” Shchukin wrote in May, describing the fuss
over Denis’s Psyche. “At present they talk of it as a great
masterpiece. They laugh at me a little, but I always say, ‘He who
laughs last, laughs best.’ I trust you always.”
Nymph and Satyr, one of the starting points for the new scheme, was
finished, crated up and posted off to Moscow in early February. By
this time, Matisse had left Paris for the Mediterranean coast. He
planned to spend a month at the little Hotel Cendrillon in Cassis,
replenishing the stocks of energy depleted by the gloom and strain
of a Parisian winter. Walking along the steeply shelving shore at
Cassis and in the chestnut woods on the cliff top, he studied air,
water, light, sun glinting on spray, waves pounding on rocks as he
had done further along the coast at Collioure four years earlier.
“There is … a cove near Cassis,” wrote Marcel Sembat, who spent
a day with Matisse in early March, “where the green of the open sea
on the horizon brings out the deep blues and foamy whites of the
tide trapped between cliffs, which you can see jostling and throwing
up little blade-like crests in the full sun.”
Movement preoccupied the painter in the run-up to the Dance. Sembat
was struck by the intensity and accuracy of Matisse’s response to
the violent swirling currents, “the clash of creative contrasts we
talked about together.” Sembat, seven years older than Matisse,
married to a painter and himself a passionate art enthusiast, was an
exceptionally acute and attentive witness. By his own account he was
living out a dream that day in Cassis, having brought with him one
of his lifelong heroes, the great reforming architect of the Third
Republic, Jean Jaurès. The Socialist leader and his two companions
walked and talked beside the sea, delighted with one another, with
the brilliant spring sunshine, and with the infectious visual
excitement emanating from Matisse at the end of his month in the
country. They rounded off their morning over lunch at the hospitable
little village inn. Sembat wrote the day up in his diary and
returned to it again a decade later, leaving no doubt that, for him
at least, there was something magical about this unlikely encounter
between two great French stars, one rising fast, the other soon due
to set forever.
Sembat’s writings provide some of the sharpest and most lucid
testimony to Matisse’s progress in the decade leading up to the
First World War. The two first met, probably, through Georgette
Agutte, Sembat’s wife, who had belonged loosely to the same little
knot of painters as Matisse in their student days. But they had an
even earlier point of contact through Matisse’s wife, Amélie, whose
father, Armand Parayre, knew Sembat from the start of his career. As
a newly elected Socialist deputy writing leaders for Parayre’s
radical campaigning newspaper, Sembat had belonged to the generation
of up-and-coming Republican politicians who, unlike many of their
elders, managed to leap clear of the sensational Humbert scandal
which all but destroyed Matisse’s in-laws in 1902. Parayre himself
survived public ignominy, imprisonment and a dramatic trial with the
help of his young son-in-law (this was the first if not the last
time Matisse had reason to be thankful for the brief training as a
lawyer forced on him by his own father).
Amélie Matisse emerged, like her father, apparently unscathed from
her family’s terrifying ordeal. (Her mother, who never got over it,
died prematurely in 1908.) But the affair left Amélie with a
deep-seated horror of any kind of exposure, and a lasting suspicion
of the outside world. It reinforced her self-reliance, her stubborn
pride and her almost reckless indifference to what other people
thought. Beneath the demure and unassertive manner that was all she
showed to those who didn’t know her, Amélie was, by the standards of
her class and age, profoundly unconventional. Her marriage had been
a gamble in which money, security, and social advantage played no
part. She became her husband’s eager partner in a high-risk
enterprise neither ever truly doubted would one day succeed. She had
recognised what was in him at sight, and backed her instinct
unreservedly ever after.
At times, when Matisse found himself disowned not only by the
professional art world but by most of his fellow artists too, his
wife remained virtually his only backer. Mutual trust was the core
of their relationship. “The basis of our happiness … was that we
built up this confidence quite naturally from the first day,” Amélie
wrote long afterwards to Marguerite. “It has been for us the
greatest good and the envy of all our friends, it meant we could get
through the worst of times.” The two did everything together. Almost
from the day they met, they were known as the Inseparables. The four
weeks Henri spent in Cassis was probably the longest time they had
been parted since their marriage eleven years before. The studio was
the centre of their world, and it was her province as much as his.
Henri and his painting gave Amélie’s life its shape and meaning.
Hardship and privation hardly mattered by comparison; nor did the
rising tide of mockery and abuse that accompanied Matisse’s growing
fame.
Even the arrival of their children hadn’t greatly changed their way
of life. When it came to a choice, work took precedence over child
care. Their elder son, Jean, grew up as much at home with his
Matisse grandparents in the north of France as with his parents in
Paris. The younger boy, Pierre, spent so much time in the south with
his Parayre grandfather and Amélie’s only sister, Berthe, that his
aunt became his second mother. Amélie herself was closer to the
boys’ older half sister, Marguerite (or Margot), who was Henri’s
child by an earlier liaison, and who became in some ways a second
self to her adoptive mother. It was Marguerite who stayed at home,
sharing the life of the studio that meant life itself to the
Matisses.
The family dynamics began to shift a little when they finally moved
out of Henri’s cramped bachelor flat in a block opposite Notre Dame
into a disused convent at 33 boulevard des Invalides on the far side
of Montparnasse. Money was still tight.
(Continues…)
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Hilary Spurling
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-43429-1
Excerpted from Matisse the Master
by Hilary Spurling
Copyright © 2005 by Hilary Spurling.
Excerpted by permission.
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