November 29, 1998
A Love Affair With Color
The first volume of a biography of Matisse traces the struggles and uncertainties of his early career.

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  • First Chapter: 'The Unknown Matisse'

    A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908.
    By Hilary Spurling.
    Illustrated. 480 pp. New York:
    Alfred A. Knopf. $40.

    The French rather despise biography: for them it is a low form, the roundup of such factoids and gossip as the law permits. The British, on the other hand, treat it as a major literary genre: monumental in Victorian times, svelte and waspish in Strachey's reinvention, and now, post-Holroyd, getting vast again. This difference is partly a matter of temperament. The French are more bourgeois, more liable to circle the wagons round the memory of a great French man or woman. The British are more prurient and more afflicted by tall-poppy syndrome (Larkin was a wanker, Durrell may have committed incest, Koestler was a rapist -- that's cut them down to size). But there is also a divergence of intellectual tradition. The French treat a work of art as a prompt to wider, more abstract reflection; the British as a segment of coded life, whether give-away self-expression or unconvincing cover-up. The French tend to be centripetal; the British reductive.

    So setting a British biographer on to the life of a great Frenchman is a deft piece of cross-casting. ''The Unknown Matisse'' is a work of deep research and intense concentration, full of archive-sweat, legwork and looking. Securing the trust of the Matisse family was central to Hilary Spurling's enterprise, but her tenacity in hunting down obscure documentation and forgotten dramatis personae is most impressive. Camille Joblaud, Matisse's early mistress and model, died at Concarneau in 1954; Spurling tracked down the nun who nursed her on her deathbed. Her sense of time, place and social texture is admirable. Above and beyond this there is her attitude to Matisse and his genius. ''When you write the biography of a friend,'' Flaubert told Ernest Feydeau (at a time when Matisse was 3), ''you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.'' Spurling is such a biographer, and such a friend.

    The first half of a famous life is usually more interesting, and more tantalizing, than the second. Once the artist has become celebrated, there tends to be only one of two plots: artist carries on hacking it, or artist loses it. Moreover, the account of a life that has become successful somehow assumes that it could not have been otherwise: that the obstacles overcome were always bound to have been overcome. Whereas the first part of a life is full of implicit narrative risk. Logically, we know that our hero is going to make it; but at the same time rival possibilities -- which seem like probabilities to our hero -- loiter like footpads.

    ''The Unknown Matisse'' is haunted at various points by the presence of such parallel, unfulfilled lives. When the 21-year-old painter first reached Paris in 1891, he was accompanied by two other young artistic renegades from French Flanders, two other versions of himself: Louis van Cutsem and Jules Petit. The first dropped out after a few years and became a sugar broker; the second stuck to his dreams and was broken. Disillusioned and ill, Petit died at the age of 26. Why them and not him, we wonder. Later in the decade, Matisse formed part of another artistic -- and again northern -- trio, with two other Henris: Evenepoel and Huklenbrok. Of the three, Huklenbrok was the most successful, and Evenepoel at least as promising as Matisse. Evenepoel died of typhoid fever in 1899, just as he was about to paint Clemenceau; Huklenbrok had a breakdown, and though he lived on until 1942, his family destroyed all his work ''for fear of seeing their name dishonored.'' The three Henris had seemed to have equal shares of northern determination, family disapproval, indifferent health (Matisse was dogged by insomnia, nervous tension and intestinal troubles) -- and talent. Again, why them and not him?

    Matisse has the good luck to keep serious (as opposed to temporarily incapacitating) ill health at bay; the greater luck to find in his wife, Amelie, a support system to replace that of his grudging family; and the mysterious something -- beyond luck, beyond hard work -- that turns talent into genius. Again and again, the reader fears for Matisse, as in a good novel: how will he get out of this hole, who will buy this work, what if he gives up? Spurling is at her most skillful in evoking the French art scene of those changing years: the old teachers, the Young Turks, the controlling authorities, the free spirits, the rivalrous camaraderie of student and debutant, neo-Impressionist and Fauve. And she is also centrally attentive to what matters most: the man before the canvas, and the fretful, intimate, public transaction that took place as Matisse worked his way toward what we now, still, call Modernism.

    One of the pauses on that path has been labeled by some critics Matisse's ''dark period'': a two-year stretch, starting in 1902, when he retrenched as an artist, drawing back from experimentalism and explosive color. The ''dark'' has previously referred only to pigment: Spurling now relates it to a wider gloom. It was in 1902 that the Humbert Affair broke -- a typically French, decades-long financial swindle beginning with an invented inheritance and ending with murder, suicide and corruption at the heart of the Republican establishment. The parents of Matisse's wife were close associates of the principals in the case, and endured much vilification before being cleared. Matisse (whose studio was searched by police when the scandal broke) became involved, and the strain led to one of his periodic nervous collapses.

    The Humbert Affair is familiar to historians; but the Matisse connection had not previously been noticed by art critics. At first Spurling merely lays out the scandal in lush detail, with not much more than an implicit Q.E.D. A hundred pages later, in one of those moments of biographical sleight of hand, she behaves as if her case were proved, referring to ''the fiercely experimental phase cut short by the Humbert scandal.'' There is, however, a certain problem of evidence. No one in the painter's wide circle ever mentioned the affair in print (or, presumably, in subsequently reported conversation); while Matisse's only reference to it -- or the only one Spurling quotes -- is a lighthearted aside. Seeing his parents-in-law give evidence in court for three days was, he quipped, ''a waste of time'' compared to a session with his favorite model. Not much sign of anguish there.

    The only real evidence is that of the paintings themselves, of Matisse's previous career and his known artistic priorities. Spurling's excitement over her discovery is understandable, but ironically the strongest argument against her theory lies in her own earlier characterization of the painter. If Flaubert was l'homme-plume, the pen-man, then Matisse was the brush-man, austerely committed to finding his way regardless of sales (the ''dark'' pictures in any case went as unsold as the pre-dark ones); he was an artist for whom having nothing to lose was actually a spur to creativity, and a man who told his future wife that much as he loved her, he would always love painting more. Does this sound like someone who would lose his nerve and paint safe because of his in-laws' embarrassment? Isn't the reason for the ''dark period'' always more likely to be painterly rather than biographical?

    This is an untypical outburst of reductivism on Hilary Spurling's part. There are also moments of uncertainty in her translation from the French; and this must be the only biography of the last 30 years to have nothing to say about its subject's sex life. But it is still a splendid work. Near its end, Spurling quotes a story of two young American women applying to study under Matisse and giving their reason as such: ''We want your color.'' Matisse replied, ''If you haven't brought your own color, you will never get mine.'' Hilary Spurling is a doughty transmitter and fierce defender of that color, and of all that it represents. Her second volume cannot arrive too soon.

    Julian Barnes's new novel, ''England, England,'' will be published here in May.

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