Voluptuous but chaste: the eagerly-awaited second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse completes a definitive life

Matisse the Master A Life of Henri Matisse: The overthrow of Colour, 1909-1954

Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 25 [pound sterling] ISBN 0 214 13339 4

The next to the first volume of Hilary Spurling's groundbreaking biography has been eagerly anticipated at any time since its brilliant predecessor, The Unknown Matisse, was published in 1998 If Matisse The Master advances as a slight disappointment, that is partly because the next to the first half of the artist's life is abundant better known than the first, and where Spurling challenges the existing version of facts it is usually a case of refining details or refuting ill-founded assumptions--a les intrinsically engaging adventure for the reader than uncovering long-buried secrets

on the other hand there is also a difference of course Although Matisse The Master overspreads the period of the artist's greatest achievements and a succession of major upheavals in his work and life, not to mention the world at large, it is sole marginally longer than The Unknown Matisse. thus in each chapter Spurling is obliged to pack in more information and describe more milestone works, and at times the true copy seems too hurried or is reticent upon subjects treated in fascinating detail in contortion one (such as the evolution of Matisse's art collection). Since the profundity of the research is of the same exemplary standard, single is bound to wonder to what amplitude external pressures--the need for discretion, perhaps, or the constraints of the publisher--may have motivated the brisker pace.

Be this as it may, when Spurling does write expansively, the combination of authentic detail and her great gifts of historical imagination and empathetic understanding follow in a compelling narrative. individual feels one is there, experiencing it all alongside Matisse--whether the highs and depresseds of his trips to Tangier before World War and Tahiti in 1930 or of his relationships with his foremost patrons, the ever-daring Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin, whose heady vision of an entire decorative scheme for his Moscow mansion was shattered through the revolution, and the ever-egotistical Albert Barnes of Philadelphia, who commissioned murals for his Foundation--which require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone Matisse a superhuman effort-and then made it virtually impossible for anyone to diocese them.

Spurling writes evocatively about Matisse's work. There is, for instance, a dramatic vignette of him seizing a pair of shears and cutting without the Emperor's costume for the of recent origin Diaghilev-Stravinsky ballet Le Chant du Rossignol--an anticipation of the decisive character scissors, wielded with speed and courage, would have in the spectacular decorative works of his elderly age. But she makes no claim to be an art historian and the great potency of Matisse The Master lies in its biographical detail and its characterisation of Matisse and those closest to him. As in the first contortion the women in his life are given special attention and as the volume unfolds we witness the deliberate painful, inexorable disintegration of his marriage to a disheartened Amelie.

Not, according to Spurling, that Amelie had a great deal of cause for sexual jealousy: the occasional, 'hygienic' visit to a brothel aside, the mature Matisse accompanyed to be sexually abstemious. Although working with moulds he found attractive was vital to him, the relationship was a professional single and lust was sublimated end the medium of his art. Despite the lyrical voluptuousness of the early drawings of Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse's beautiful Russian muse and assistant, and his constant companion from 1935 onwards, there was, it appears no physical affair, however abundant desire may have fanned their mutual devotion initially. Spurling also expresse scepticism about the reality of a abundant earlier 'affair' with the Russian painter, Olga Meerson That being for a like reason it was perhaps

an uneven choice to decorate the dustjacket with her attractively informal portrait of Matisse and the paint-encrusted palette that he gave her.

Spurling has had unrivalled access to the Matisse family archives and constantly adduces snatches from the voluminous surviving correspondence. If his public persona was studiedly 'normal', almost close the private Matisse was a lifelong insomniac and an obsessive, emotionally volatile, exorbitantly demanding man. Despair dogged him and no individual was in more urgent ne of the 'soothing, calming' 'good armchair' than he. be seized ofed entirely by his work, Matisse hanged on his family to provide full unconditional support, on his types to collaborate by inspiring and staging fresh pictures--they were dismissed if they cracked below the strain--and on male friends of the like kind as Simon Bussy to help him overtop his frequent creative crises.

When upon his travels or living alone, alphabetic characters to his family were the principal egress for Matisse's every thought and feeling, as well as the conduit for a stream of peremptory instructions about everything from a healthy diet and the number of hours by means of day to be spent in tonic exercise, to the care of his work and the upbringing of his grandchildren. Amelie, sunk in depression and bedridden during a great deal of of this book, must frequently have dreaded the postman's footfall because it did not come into view to Matisse that receiving a dozen, closely written pages at a proceed (the record was seventy-four) might be an annihilating rather than gratifying experience. Her requite was the telegram or total silence. by the agency of contrast, Marguerite, Matisse's beloved daughter, did not gripe [i]or[/i] grip her tongue and could be a scorching critic the two of her father's character and of his painting, while Pierre, the younger son who made a happy career as a dealer in of recent origin York, was equally capable of devastating epistolary candour.