Edward Steichen, Henri Matisse Working on “La Serpentine”
The move to Issy-les-Moulineaux in the autumn of 1909 was part of a larger strategy of disengagement and withdrawal. “If my story were ever to be told in full…,” Matisse wrote thirty years later, “it would amaze everyone who reads it. When I was dragged through the mud. I never protested. As time goes on, I realise more and more how completely I was misunderstood, and how unjustly I was treated.”1 Ostracism and rejection made him stubborn. “The whole world turned its back on him,” said Lydia Delectorskaya, the companion to whom Matisse talked more freely than to anyone else in his last years. “Everyone clustered round the Cubists, there was a whole court centred on Picasso. It was a question of pride. He never wanted to make a show of himself, to reveal how much it hurt him.”2
The incident that confirmed Matisse’s outcast status, at any rate in his own mind, came one day when he turned into one of the artists’ cafés in Montparnasse for a drink with Picasso and his band, who refused to speak to him. Matisse never forgot sitting alone at the next table in a café full of fellow painters, none of whom returned his greeting. “All my life I’ve been in quarantine,” he said when he recalled the scene.3 This was how he had felt as a boy in Bohain, when his father first discovered his mad plan to be a painter. He used the same image to describe how it felt, at the age of twenty-five in 1896, to find people treating his work as if it were alive with germs. He was appalled a decade later when press and public once again identified him as a plague-carrier, spreading infection and pollution at the head of the notorious Fauves.
The acclaim that was the obverse side of this abuse brought little consolation. Matisse was more disconcerted than delighted by young followers hoping to pick up the knack of making colour explode on their canvases the way it did on his. The power of crowds or groups meant nothing to him. His closest ally, André Derain, had long since transferred allegiance to Picasso, together with Georges Braque (who had experimented briefly with Fauvism) and various lesser Fauves. Their defection was in some sense a relief to Matisse, who had never seen himself as the leader of a party. Art for him had no political dimension. “He was interested neither in fending off opposition, nor in competing for the favour of wayward friends,” wrote Françoise Gilot, contrasting Matisse’s behaviour with Picasso’s. “His only competition was with himself.”4
By 1909, the vogue had peaked. Painters all over Montparnasse and Montmartre whose canvases had once turned blue in imitation of Cézanne, and later switched to the rainbow palette of the Fauves, now put aside “the outmoded power of colour” in favour of black grids. Anyone in tune with current trends went out and bought a set-square. “Everyone wielded a brush. Not just those whose calling it was but also poets, schoolboys out for a laugh, retired old people, writers, models of both sexes, even down to the chip-seller on the Place du Tertre who made a fortune out of painting.”5 Of all the competing Parisian factions, Cubism was the liveliest and most warlike. “Wholesale massacre” was its slogan, “nothing less than total destruction” was its programme. Over the next few years potential rivals (“Fauves, Neo-classicists, Post-Impressionists, Futurists, Simultanists, Realists, Pointillistes”) were named and shamed at rumbustious meetings convened by Picasso’s camp-followers.
But their favourite target was Matisse, who was busy dismantling his own power base at this point. He decamped to Issy, submitting only two relatively inoffensive flower paintings to the Autumn Salon, resigning from the committee of the Salon des Indépendants the year after, and giving up his school at the same time. “I rolled myself into a ball in my corner as an observer, and waited to see what would happen.”6 Thirty or forty of his works remained behind in Paris, on view in the apartment of Sarah and Michael Stein at 58 rue Madame. “The vast studio was crowded with visitors,” reported the English critic Louis Hind. “My first sensation was of dismay, almost of horror.”7 But Hind was struck in spite of himself by the eerie power emanating from the painter’s self-portrait: “That head of himself—bearded, brooding, tense, fiercely elemental in colour—seemed as I gazed to be not a portrait but an aspect of the man, the serious Matisse, almost a recluse, indifferent to opinion, whose aim it is to approach each fresh canvas as if there were no past in art, as if he is the first artist who has ever painted.”
House at Issy-les-Moulineaux: the first and only family home the Matisses ever owned
That aim could not be achieved without some sort of distancing, but Matisse dreaded as much as he needed the isolation Issy gave him. The new house stood on the summit of a hill in an area already parcelled out into speculative building plots.8 The Matisses occupied a double corner plot surrounded on three sides by high walls and at the front by a metal grille. Inside the double gates, the front path curved round a circular lawn before the house with a cypress alley leading off at right angles to the big new studio, a sturdy prefabricated structure put together from metal girders and wood planking in the furthest corner of the property, against the northern boundary wall. Glass doors, huge windows and skylights in the roof made it broiling hot in summer and hard to heat in winter.
The house itself was medium-sized, solid and unpretentious, white-painted and grey-tiled with a central porch and mansard roof: unremarkable except that it was the only one of its kind on the heights above Issy. The rooms were mostly small, but well proportioned. There was a pretty, octagonal dining room on one side of the hall, and a long drawing room at the other, running from front to back with a window at each end. The house had a telephone, a bathroom and central heating, rare luxuries in France in the first decade of the twentieth century. It faced south, looking out over fields and market gardens, halfway along the road joining the town to the railway station at Clamart, itself still a small country village on the edge of woods stretching northwards to Versailles. The old rural communities were being torn up by the roots. Abandoned cottages and outbuildings all over the surrounding farmland were being hastily adapted to house workers from the densely packed industrial development lining the riverbanks at Issy. When the Matisses moved into 92—94 route de Clamart, they were virtually the only inhabitants on their section of the road. Over the next few years a double line of much smaller houses would come snaking up the hill towards them, occupied by bank clerks, railway employees, commercial travellers and office workers taking refuge from the smoke and din of the factories on the plain below.
For the circle Matisse and his wife had left behind in Paris, Issy was well beyond the limits of the known world. He begged old friends to visit, pointing out that fifty-four trains from Montparnasse station ran daily to Clamart. Marcel Sembat proposed ordering four hundred visiting cards incorporating a route map to the Matisses’ farflung northern suburb, but it was hard to persuade Parisians to venture out beyond the Porte de Versailles. Matisse’s departure fuelled increasingly wild stories. Rumours multiplied about the splendour of his country house, and the luxurious studio in his grounds. People said he was charging crazy prices. Even his old friends believed it. Jules Flandrin complained that his own pictures still fetched only 75 francs each while Matisse had persuaded a tame Russian to shell out 75,000 for a single painted panel.9 Simon Bussy sent rueful congratulations on the fabulous wealth pouring into the Matisse household at last after twenty years of grinding poverty.10
In fact, money was a constant worry in the first years at Issy. The rent of 3,000 francs a year over-stretched the family budget so that it was often hard to scrape up the next instalment at the end of each quarter, or pay for extras like doctors’ bills.11 The lease would scarcely have been feasible if Matisse hadn’t signed a contract with Maurice Denis’s dealers, the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune. Safe, prosperous and relatively stuffy, the Bernheims were beginning to expand into modern art under the fastidious and phenomenally successful guidance of Félix Fénéon. Taking on Matisse was Fénéons riskiest move to date. The contract—dated 18 September 1909, a few months short of the painters fortieth birthday—offered him a measure of financial stability for the first time in his life. The Bernheims agreed to buy everything he painted, paying on delivery according to a scale which ranged from 1,875 francs for a large wall painting to 450 for the smallest size of canvas, together with a royalty of 25 percent on sales.12 The deal led to much envious gossip in Paris. Fénéon was said to have preempted potential rivals by intercepting the painter with a contract at the station on his return from the south (legend credited Eugène Druet with having done exactly the same thing three years earlier).13 But neither side can have gained much from their bargain in the first twelve months, which Matisse spent working on Dance and Music already contracted to Shchukin.
Still hopeful at this stage of receiving more commissions, Matisse had negotiated special terms for portraits and decorative schemes. But the only prospective taker turned out to be Bernard Berenson, in Paris that autumn in search of a painter to decorate the new library at his villa of I Tatti outside Florence. Berenson was taken aback by the rough-and-ready style of Matisse’s studio—”He was still anything but prosperous”—and dubious about his work.14 He bought the Copper Beeches of 1901, which was small and relatively safe (though bold enough for him to enjoy the shocked reactions of connoisseurs drawn to I Tatti by his incomparable collection of Italian primitives).15 Matisse sent sample drawings for the library, following them up in December with photographs of his Dance. This time Berensons response was unequivocal—”The composition delighted me: I study the blank spaces with my eyes, and feel the rhythm with my whole body”—but it came too late. The commission had already gone to Matisse’s old acquaintance René Piot, whose weak sense of design, flashy execution and vapid colouring made even Maurice Denis look daring. Berenson would realise his mistake as soon as he saw the finished murals a year later. “About the frescoes—they are really more horrible than words can paint,” wrote Mary Berenson, describing her husband’s shame and fury. “I cannot imagine a more complete fiasco.”
The discovery that Berenson had turned him down in favour of Piot added to the deepening gloom that overtook Matisse in his first winter at Issy. The move that was to have provided a fresh start for the whole family sometimes felt more like a disaster. “The time I suffered most was in those first years at Issy, when I felt I had crammed too many sails on my boat.” Matisse said, looking back.16 The change went beyond physical upheaval. It meant a whole new way of life for the Matisses, who had always travelled light, living simply in rented rooms with little in the way of personal belongings beyond Henri’s paintings and his working collection of textiles, ceramics and African carvings. At Issy, the household and its responsibilities weighed heavily. A school had to be organised for the boys, a doctor found for Marguerite. The garden had to be dug and planted. The work was too much for Amélie to manage alone, even with the aid of the odd-job man from the school, Marc Antonio César, who came regularly by train from Paris to help out.
Matisse drew up a schedule.17 Sunday was set aside for private relaxation, Monday for visitors and correspondence. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday would be spent in the studio. On Friday and Saturday he taught classes in Paris at the school, which had stayed on at 33 boulevard des Invalides in an unsold convent building. The student body was constantly changing and expanding. Newcomers, turning up for the few weeks or months they happened to be in Paris, grumbled about a teacher who reduced his visits to once a week, and eventually to once a fortnight. Their steady pressure added to the practical problems involved in maintaining a studio so far away from the artists’ quarter on the Left Bank, where Matisse had spent his entire professional life until now. Deliveries had to be arranged, materials laid in, and models persuaded to take the train to Clamart. Potential clients and collectors from abroad could not be persuaded to time their visits to suit anyone but themselves.
Even when it ran smoothly, the timetable left less than half the week for work. This was the core of Matisse’s trouble. The move to Issy freed him from the daily bulletins of malicious gossip that had tormented him in Paris, but it brought him face-to-face with worse anxieties. He missed the fellow painters who had always surrounded him in the same tenement building, or in studios a few streets away. Even after he left the quai St-Michel, he had never been more than ten minutes’ walk from the centre of Montparnasse. Mutual support and consultation were a key part of his working pattern. Old friends recognised the desperation underlying Matisse’s pleas to visit him at Issy. Marquet came as often as he could, and so did Manguin. Charles Camoin and Maximilien Luce both set up their easels to paint the view from the riverbank at the foot of the hill below Matisse’s house. But none of them could drop in any longer on a daily basis.
Camoin and Marquet in Matisse’s studio
The intense, unremitting effort required by Dance and Music set up a state of tension that gave way to mounting panic. Once again Matisse could not sleep. Prolonged insomnia frightened him, and wore him down. He felt incapable, frustrated, full of foreboding. Shchukin, who might have reassured him, was being treated in Paris for failing eyesight when news came that one of his two surviving sons had killed himself. This was the third suicide of a close relation in less than four years to hit Shchukin, who had not fully got over his wife’s sudden death in 1907. “You see how thickly life is strewn with ordeals,” Matisse wrote, explaining why the Russian had had to leave for home in January 1910. “Luckily he has great courage.”18
Snow fell on Issy in the New Year, followed by the worst floods in living memory. The streets disappeared under nearly six feet of water. People evacuated their homes in the town by boat, piling furniture and bedding on the roofs. Rain fell and the river continued rising for ten days. Flood-waters filled the valley beneath the grey leaden skies that always paralysed Matisse. Ten months later, he looked back with horror to the impotence and inertia that had overtaken him. “Think of me at the time of last winter’s martyrdom,” he told his wife, who had for once been unable to lift his depression. “It would have been better to be far from home and on form, than at your side and so helpless.”19
One of the inducements held out by the Bernheims for him to join their gallery was the offer of a one-man exhibition in 1910. The show was scheduled to open on 14 February. The two panels on which Matisse had laboured since the autumn were far from ready, and he had done little else that winter. Instead he planned a retrospective, starting with a traditional Flemish still life from his student days and plunging swiftly into the astonishing experiments that followed: the initial eruption of colour triggered by his exposure to the light of the Mediterranean in 1898; the brief encounter with Divisionism in 1904 that led on to Fauvism itself, inaugurating an unprecedented series of rich, complex, increasingly synthetic colour harmonies; and ending with the Sembats’ Seated Nude of 1909. Hardly any of the sixty-five paintings on show were for sale (most had been loaned by private collectors, well over a third by the Steins). This was the most comprehensive showing Matisse’s work had ever had, and he hoped it would demonstrate a steady, logical progression towards a stripped-down and reinvigorated modern art.
Floodwaters rising in Matisse’s first winter at Issy-les-Moulineaux
The critics responded with a dismissive brutality that even Matisse had scarcely encountered on this scale before. They accused him of vulgar excess, wilful confusion and gratuitous barbarity. Even the more serious reviewers found him incapable of following any consistent line, or evolving a style of his own. One after another they attributed their inability to make head or tail of what Matisse was doing to his shortcomings rather than their own. Attacks came from all quarters. The young and progressive were as splenetic as the elderly and conservative. The veteran Octave Mirbeau, friend and champion of the Impressionists, reported to Claude Monet at Giverny that the exhibition showed Matisse suffering from general paralysis of the insane—”It’s been a success. Russians and Germans, male and female, drooling in front of each picture, drooling with joy and admiration, naturally.”20
Ambitious journalists in their twenties competed to outdo one another at Matisse’s expense. André Salmon wrote him off in Paris-Journal as an incoherent second-rater appreciated only by minor artists from abroad. Roland Dorgelès made his name (he would end up as president of the Académie Goncourt) a fortnight after Matisse’s show closed by submitting a canvas to the Salon des Indépendants called Sunset over the Adriatic by J. R. Boronali. Dorgelès became famous overnight when he revealed with maximum publicity that Boronali was an ass—none other than the donkey belonging to the owner of Picasso’s favourite Montmartre hangout, the Lapin Agile—which had produced the work in question by swishing a loaded paintbrush tied to its tail.21 He clinched his point with an article at the end of the year accusing Matisse simultaneously, in the crudest racist terms, of pomposity and incompetence (“He paints like a nigger while talking like a Magus”).22 Envy and resentment were blatant in most of these attacks. Much play was made of the vast income Matisse gained from shrewd and cynical exploitation of his credulous foreign followers, and the laurel wreath from Germany (some claimed it was a golden crown) that he was said to wear for teaching.23
The show attracted so much attention that its run had to be extended by ten days. When it finally closed on 5 March, Matisse left Paris, travelling south alone to take refuge with Amélie’s father and sister at Perpignan. From there he moved on by train along the coast to Collioure, where he was joined by the sculptor Aristide Maillol and the painter Etienne Terrus. These two had been the first to make him feel at home in their native region in 1905. They had worked by his side that summer, and stood by him in the storms that broke over the work he took back to Paris in the autumn. In March 1910, Matisse said he was fleeing from the Parisian cold, but snow fell in Collioure soon after he got there, and it is clear from his daily letters to his wife that the warmth he needed was the reassuring company of old friends.
“Maillol and his wife are being very good to me, and Terrus the same,” he wrote. “My dear Amélie, how can I describe my feelings on rediscovering Collioure? Fond and sad. Its a part of our life.”24 He made the rounds of the little town where they knew everyone, exchanging news and catching up on local gossip. The place was wonderfully calm and restful. “I’ve become a Cocolibrian [native of Collioure] again,” he told Amélie, proposing to keep on the rented attic studio on the avenue de la Gare where he stored his painting things so that he could come back to paint next winter. “All I need to be completely happy is to have all of you here with me.”25
He revisited his old painting sites with Maillol and Terrus, walking along the shore to the bay at Ouille, lunching at the local inn and spending the afternoon in the hills above the town. The Maillols invited him to stay at Banyuls. Terrus—who lived alone all his life in the village where he was born, painting the mountains and the sea, tolerated by his neighbours and ignored by the Parisian art world—was one of Matisse’s trustiest confidants. The two had commiserated with one another before on the score of indifference, hostility and neglect. No one could have listened more sympathetically than Terrus to Matisse’s account of the “crisis of will” which he feared might get the better of him this time.26 Between them, his two old allies restored Matisse’s confidence. Soon he was sleeping better, and announcing that his father- and sister-in-law wouldn’t recognise him as the wreck he had been when he first arrived.27 The sun shone, peach trees bloomed beneath the snow, and the landscape looked magnificent. Matisse wrote to Gertrude Stein to say that he had grown three years younger.28
He returned to Paris in early April to find support already being mobilised. He had sent a single canvas to the Salon des Indépendants, and been energetically defended by Guillaume Apollinaire (“No man is a prophet in his own country and, in applauding him, foreigners applaud that same France who is herself prepared to stone one of the most seductive of all contemporary artists”).29 The writer Michel Puy, whose brother Jean had been Matisse’s companion as a student, was preparing a vigorous and carefully reasoned essay in his defence.30 The Sembats had protested strongly to the Minister for Fine Arts about the state’s failure to purchase Matisse’s work (“any mention of the name of Matisse is enough to make the Academicians froth at the mouth,” the Ministers representative replied frankly).31
Reviewers were markedly more respectful in New York than in Paris in March when Alfred Stieglitz’s tiny, enterprising 291 Gallery put on the second Matisse show ever mounted in the United States, consisting of drawings and black-and-white reproductions of his most revolutionary recent paintings. In April, Matisse canvases were included in exhibitions in Berlin, Budapest and Florence. The director of the Neue Staatsgalerie in Munich, Baron Hugo von Tschudi, who agreed with Shchukin that Matisse was one of the key artists of the twentieth century, commissioned a painting (this Still Life with Geraniums, which powerfully impressed the young Kandinsky, would become the first of Matisse’s paintings to enter a museum when the Staatsgalerie bought it after Tschudi’s death in 1911).32
Much of this activity could be traced back directly or indirectly to the Steins, and in particular to Sarah Stein, who concentrated her considerable energies on promoting Matisse while her sister-in-law, Gertrude, threw her no less substantial weight behind Picasso. Artistically the most gifted of the family but wholly lacking in Gertrudes genius for self-promotion, Sarah gave up painting at this point (she trained as a Christian Science practitioner instead, on the grounds that she could do it in a year, whereas it would take her fifteen to become a painter). She combined a bold and discriminating visual sense with mesmeric power. Visiting Americans, bamboozled into buying from Matisse rather than spending their money on copies of old masters from the Louvre, often found their confidence draining away once they left the apartment on the rue Madame. “They spoke of this to Mrs. Stein, who smiled as one who could sympathise with their ignorance, but as one who understood things beyond their appreciation.”33
Her collection was a learning ground for most of Matisse’s early admirers, from Shchukin himself to Berenson and the young American photographer Edward Steichen, who had organised the two New York shows, proposing the artist in the first place, picking the works himself, and persuading Matisse to have his picture taken in the studio at Issy. First-time visitors to the Michael Steins’ apartment generally fell back in disgust, before discovering to their surprise that they couldn’t tear themselves away from the canvases that lined the walls frame to frame three or four deep. “An astonishing sight, glaring and gay, crude but great beauty of line,” wrote the English Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose own taste for gaudy colours, barbaric jewellery and stupendous hats made her more receptive than most, although she didn’t care for the solemn hush Mrs. Stein also managed to impose: “No one dared to talk, silenced perhaps by the clamour that seemed to shout from the walls.”34
Matisse, Matthew Prichard, 1914: the philosophical English friend who lent a thoroughly Oxonian respectability to Matisse’s strange experiments
Lady Ottoline’s guide in Paris was her compatriot Matthew Prichard, another of the regulars at 58 rue Madame. Prichard was a Socratic teacher and thinker who held no official post, avoided the academic world, rarely if ever lectured in public and published virtually nothing. But he possessed, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “an influence out of all proportion to his public fame,”35 and exerted it in these years exclusively on Matisse’s behalf. Oxford educated, trained as a lawyer and aesthetically self-taught. Prichard had abandoned a promising career as an Oriental specialist at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1908. moving to Paris in his early forties to apply himself to modern art instead.
A visual sophisticate (like Berenson, who had abhorred Matisse until taken in hand by Sarah Stein), Prichard passed through the usual stages of shock, incredulity and conversion at lightning speed, reporting his progress in letters throughout 1909 to a friend in Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Baffled by his initial encounter with Matisse’s work in January (“He is… coarse, is shortsighted, perhaps has some other optical trouble”),36 he was admiring, if still faintly dubious, three months later, and by the summer had made Matisse’s cause his own, committing himself with all the fervour of a narrow, fastidious and passionate intelligence. He responded with characteristic violence to a London friend who told him John Singer Sargent had dismissed Matisse’s painting as worthless: “I replied insolently and hyperbolically that if Mr. S. knew the truth he would commit hara-kiri before one of his own portraits.”
From then on Prichard never looked seriously at another contemporary artist. The Bernheim show in 1910 inflamed his imagination. “As soon as I entered the gallery, I was almost dazzled by the splendour and brilliance of your works,” he told Matisse.37 By this time, he was paying regular visits to the studio at Issy, bringing potential collectors, connoisseurs and critics. Prichard’s circle divided more or less equally into wealthy middle-aged women on the one hand and young male disciples on the other. Lady Ottoline herself, Mrs. Emily Chadbourne of Chicago and Park Lane in London, Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears and Mrs. Samuel Warren of Boston were all assured of Matisse’s towering status, and personally escorted to his studio, by Prichard.
He convinced Mrs. Chadbourne she should buy a bronze and several drawings, failed to persuade Mrs. Sears to let her daughter pose for a portrait (he would succeed later with Yvonne Landsberg’s mother) and arranged for Mrs. Warren to sit herself. The Byzantinist Thomas Whitte-more, who had caused such trouble by posting a wreath of bays from Berlin, was one of Prichard’s protégés. It was Prichard who introduced the young Eliot to Matisse before the First World War,38 together with many other prospective highfliers, including a future generation of curators like William King of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and theorists like Camille Schuwer and Georges Duthuit.
Prichard came close to embodying the French stereotype of an eccentric Englishman: handsome and clean-cut with a firm profile and an almost flamboyant indifference to clothes. He moved easily in worldly circles but chose to live alone on vegetables, in a series of rented rooms, with the frugality of a Chinese scholar. His ample network of contacts, and the satisfaction he got from bringing them together, did not stop him remaining (like Matisse himself) in Parisian terms a complete outsider. “One of the aspects of his personality that appealed to Matisse,” wrote Rémi Labrusse, the scholar who rescued Prichard singlehanded from oblivion more than half a century after his death, “was precisely that Prichard admired him as a modern painter… while at the same time playing no part in the contemporary art world, its fashions, factions and power ploys.”39
Independence, an ingrained refusal or inability to conform, was the key to Prichard’s life and thought. His background in Oriental and Byzantine studies had led him to mistrust the Western classical heritage. He looked to the decorative traditions of the East to release a powerful new vision that would replace the outmoded laws of three-dimensional illusion. Prichard, who had begun exploring possible links between Occidental and Oriental approaches in Boston, found Matisse putting into practice many of the principles he had himself outlined in theory. Over the next five years Prichard’s well-stocked, well-cultivated and essentially philosophical mind would lend intellectual weight and brilliance—”a thoroughly Oxonian respectability”—to the strange course Matisse was already taking.
Sarah Stein, too, had experienced little or no difficulty in grasping the import of Matisse’s paintings the first time she saw them, having come from a similar direction, through the Chinese art, lacquerwork and ceramics with which she had begun her career as a collector before she left San Francisco for Paris. She inclined naturally to Prichard’s belief that the Orient showed the way towards the art of the future. Their company was tonic for Matisse. Whenever he attended an evening gathering at the rue Madame, he would spend much of it talking privately in a back room with Mrs. Stein and Prichard. “The conversations with Prichard, and with the Steins, helped Matisse to get away from the atmosphere of the studio, to escape from his everyday preoccupations,” his daughter Marguerite wrote later, “—they opened a perspective on to wider horizons, which troubled him at the time but could only be fruitful in the long run.”40
Prichard himself recorded many of these conversations, including a relatively early one that took place in front of the Rembrandts in the Long Gallery at the Louvre on the eve of Matisse’s opening at Bernheim-Jeune. Prichard’s account—allowing for his still imperfect French, and the imperial arrogance that afflicted even the least conventional Englishman in those days—bears out Marguerite’s view that Matisse found his ideas initially disturbing:
My position about art seemed to disconcert him, and he had to wriggle extraordinarily… when I showed him some Byzantine things, he had to adopt an attitude which was v. elaborate, artificial and untenable. He returned to the matter later in the afternoon in a way to show he was uncomfortable still.… To me he quite certainly does not see the bearing of his own work, or that he is an innovator, and an innovator whom others will follow soon. He said to me in the Louvre— “Then you don’t like all these pictures in the Long Gallery—and you place oriental art higher than them!”41
Matisse told an American interviewer, well before he ever met Prichard, that he relied on Oriental art to help him express abstract ideas through the simplification of form and colour.42 But the Englishman’s invincible certainties, together with the fresh sources he opened up and the discomfort he fermented, came at precisely the right moment. He helped Matisse to analyse and regulate alarming developments on canvas through what would evolve over the next few years into a joint theory of aesthetics. Prichard’s rigorous intellectual approach corresponded to the disciplined side of Matisse, the side that struggled, as he said himself, “to get some order into my brain.”43 This was the sober workmanlike character in buttoned-up white overalls photographed by Steichen in the studio at Issy.
But there remained the question of what Matisse was working on in the long hours he spent shut up alone, watching Dance (II) (colour fig. 4) grow under his slashing brushstrokes, shaping and reshaping the larger-than-life-size figures with their pointed satyrs ears, muscular red bodies and prehensile feet. Prichard himself held that art was primarily instinctive and emotional. Like many nervous, intense and rigidly controlled ascetics, he needed some sort of tool or strategy to help him break through to a more intuitive level of his being. In his case, it was art. “Much of what Matisse gives us is to be found in our unconscious life,” he wrote in one of the notebooks devoted to his “Conversations with Matisse.” “To find what it is we must plunge there in a state of trance or ecstasy, we must swim along the bottom of the stream of our existence.”44
Matisse used more violent language to describe his efforts to kick down the door between himself and painting. The struggle was at its most ferocious over the ring of dancers Prichard had first seen in April 1909. Matisse spent that year concentrating successively on one thing at a time: the fierce clashing movement of the elements in the incoming tide whipped by wind and trapped by rocks at Cassis; the vibrating bands of light, heat and colour under the pine trees at Cavalière; the plastic possibilities of the human figure, explored in a series of extraordinary clay figures modelled during the first months at Issy. The attempt to organise and exploit his findings within the framework of his original design began as soon as the first of the two enormous canvases was finally erected in the new studio.
Prichard came regularly with small groups of friends or followers, mustering support and monitoring progress. Both panels went through many stages. Georgette Sembat saw an early stage of Music on 30 March 1910, just before Matisse’s return from Collioure. She wrote to tell him that she was impressed by the flow of the drawing, but worried that the newly heightened colour of the musicians’ bodies would mean repainting the dancers to match.45 All Matisse’s friends knew how much he relied on their critical response. Pierre Bonnard asked why he had eliminated tones and shadows (Matisse, after a sleepless night, decided the answer was that they added nothing to the effect he wanted).46 Leo Stein described sitting in the studio at Issy talking to Matisse, who constantly jumped up to make drastic changes to Music on the wall behind them.47
Each of the panels was eight and a half feet high and well over twelve feet long. Matisse painted from stepladders, slapping away with big brushes at figures taller than himself. Hans Purrmann, who sometimes acted as studio assistant, was amazed by the way the alteration of one line could upset the balance of the whole vast composition (“He kept rearranging the limbs of the four figures… and manipulated the entire group as if it were one single figure with eight legs and eight arms”).48 Matisse painted intuitively, without thought or premeditation, like a dancer or an athlete. Months of preparation and practice meant that calculation translated directly into spontaneous action. “A picture is like a game of cards,” he told Purrmann. “You must figure out from the very beginning what you will have at the end; everything must be worked backwards and always be finished before it is begun.”
The process was intensely physical. Matisse hummed dance hall tunes as he worked on the plunging rhythms of Dance, which went back before he ever saw the Catalan fishermen on the beach at Collioure to his memories of workmen and soldiers whirling their sweethearts round the floor at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre.49 The figures on his canvas grew beneath his brush into a great elemental surge of release and liberation. At times he seemed to be unleashing forces that, according to Purrmann, “frightened even him.” As an image of thrusting, pulsing life being pumped back into a dead classical tradition, the painting could hardly be more graphic. This was the animal uprush of feeling Matisse had experienced as a boy of twenty at the great turning point of his whole life, when his mother gave him his first paint-box: “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”50
Its bestial aspect was the first thing that struck Matisse’s contemporaries about Dance. They said it was primitive, grotesque, diabolical, barbaric and cannibalistic. He repeated that peace and harmony had been his aim, pointing out that the stillness and absorption of the figures in Music (colour fig. 5) were intended to contrast with the delirious abandon of his dancers. He had worked on the two panels alternately, switching from the bodies levering themselves into the air and hurling themselves earthwards on the first canvas to the engrossed and softly rounded shapes strung across the second like notes in music. The contrast once again reflected two sides of his nature. Music had been Matisse’s first love, and he always regretted the rejection entailed in choosing painting as a career. He had played the fiddle as a boy, and retained ever afterwards a special feeling for violins and violinists, using them as a kind of stand-in or substitute for the artist in his work. The violin player in Music, whose rudimentary body seems no more than a conduit or conductor for the feeling flowing through his instrument, would reappear almost a decade later in Violinist at the Window, painted at another pivotal point in Matisse’s career.
He explained his intentions in 1910 to the American art critic Charles H. Caffin, who had already published one interview with him. A sympathetic and intelligent observer, Caffin had been disconcerted at their first meeting by the evident sanity of the painter popularly billed as a wild beast or madman. His article, published in Camera Work in January 1909, was among the first to try to interpret Matisse’s work for American readers. In his second interview, conducted in front of the two more or less finished panels, Caffin catches something of Matisses own exhaustion and elation in his account of the violinist on the left of Music—”the tension of his body as taut and vibrating as that of the strings”—and even more in his description of the singer in the middle: “His limbs were gathered up close to his body very much in the attitude of a jumper, while through the wide opening of the mouth his whole nature seemed to be draining out.”51
Matisse described to his old friend Jean Biette how he felt on having brought Music to its definitive state towards the end of May. “It’s been an immense effort which has exhausted me, so much so that I’m feeling a bit drained at this moment,” he wrote, “—and I could do with a good month’s rest, which I can’t take.”52 Crowds poured in to see the Bernheim show in spite of the critics’ response. “If you only knew how I long to get away from here. I’m being made to suffer for the importance I’ve taken on recently. I’d rather things were simpler.” Matisse finally gave up his school in June. (“What a relief!” he told Biette. “I took it far too seriously.”) His regular teaching sessions had become more and more of a burden, student numbers unmanageable, the rumours racing round Paris about his military discipline and crackpot tuition steadily more absurd. Matisse confided in Prichard that what most of his students needed was spiritual makeover rather than technical instruction. But the school produced long-term effects, both on individual pupils and on their teacher’s reputation. His students went home speaking a new visual language. All the countries represented by sizeable numbers—the Scandinavian nations, the United States, Germany and Russia—acquired substantial holdings of Matisse’s work in his lifetime (Germany’s would be disposed of under Hitler, Soviet Russia’s successively confiscated by Lenin and incarcerated by Stalin), unlike France, England and the rest of Europe, whose citizens stayed away (Matthew Smith, Matisse’s lifelong follower and only English pupil, said he had been too shy even to catch the master’s eye, let alone speak to him).
Completing Dance and Music kept Matisse in his studio all through the summer of 1910. At this point, he needed more than ever to know how his work looked to other people. Almost anyone would do. The more innocent the eye, the better. He had always relied for an immediate response on his children and his models. When a girl posing for one of his clay figures remarked on the ugliness of the result, adding that if you looked closer there was something about it that wasn’t exactly ugly, Matisse pressed her so hard to tell him more that she came close to tears.53 To her his insistence may have had bullying overtones, but to him she represented a future for his work, a time when people might come to see that it wasn’t so ugly after all. He told Leo Stein that he always hoped, at the beginning of every picture, “that he could end without any distortion that would offend the public, but that he could not succeed.”
Matisse spent much time showing and explaining his two panels to a stream of inquisitive and often discouraging visitors. When the New Yorker Henry McBride was taken along in June by two other critics, all three ended up feeling awkward and embarrassed (“There was great uncertainty in my mind whether the huge canvas… was meant as a joke or as a serious attempt at something beautiful”).54 McBride’s companions were Bryson Burroughs and Roger Fry, who smoothed things over with characteristic tact, asking questions in his fluent French and saying something noncommittal when asked for an opinion. They waved good-bye to Matisse from Clamart station with considerable relief. “We all agreed that we liked him very much and thought him frank and honest,” wrote McBride, “showing that there had been some doubt of his honesty in our minds.”
Fry had come to sound Matisse out about the possibility of contributing to a mixed show in London. When he had first proposed bringing over the work of the much talked about French painters (“sometimes called revolutionaries, but more often raving lunatics”), Fry’s friend Clive Bell assumed he was out of his mind.55 Fry himself privately put Matisse’s painting on a par with the work of his own seven-year-old daughter.56 His review of Dance and Music in October was cold and uncomprehending. He would retain his suspicions about Matisse until well after the opening of what became the first Post-Impressionist show in November. Matisse, who was used to being taken for a conman, must have known he was letting himself in for a double dose of trouble with work going on view for the first time in London immediately after the showing of his decorative panels at the Paris Autumn Salon.
He admitted to Biette that the long solitary haul of the last twelve months had left him mentally exhausted (“This is between the two of us, mon vieux, for I’ve enough troubles already without letting people see my weak points”).57 Matisse had detested his first winter at Issy so much that he resolved never to spend another there if he could help it, but his dream of taking the family with him next winter to the Midi had to be shelved because of the boys’ schooling. Jean had settled into the nearby Lycée Michelet, where Pierre would join him in the autumn. A year after her operation, Marguerites health seemed on the mend at last. Her father reported to Terrus in early June that her throat was cured, and his own crisis of confidence was over.58 He took a few days off to stay with Léon Vassaux, and another ten days in August for a painting trip with Mar-quet.59 The garden at Issy was a delight to the whole family. High boundary walls enclosed almost exactly an acre of ground with tangled shrubberies, rough lawns at back and front, tall trees, twisting paths, a lilac grove, a fruit orchard, two ornamental pools and a greenhouse where Amélie raised seedlings and grew begonias. It was, as Matisse said “between pride and chagrin” to Gertrude Stein, a smaller, more tousled and unruly version of the Luxembourg Gardens.60 Amélie planted beds of brilliant flowers on either side of the path leading to Henri’s studio. Etienne Terrus offered to send cuttings from his climbing roses. There were steps and a shady porch at the front of the house, a table and garden chairs under the nut trees beside the pond at the back.
The place could hardly have been more sheltered and secluded. In their first two years at 92 route de Clamart, the Matisses had no immediate neighbours except for a railway inspector further down the hill at no. 82 and a local government clerk at no. 62. The other families, arriving later, were either retired or much younger couples with small children. Shut up in her big house set among fields and building sites, Amélie found herself cut off for the first time from the perpetual comings and goings of painters and their wives or girlfriends, who had made up her world until now. At some stage, the family acquired a maid, Marie Danjou, from Amélie’s native Roussillon (who must have been lonely too, since there were no other southerners in Issy and few domestic servants).61 Otherwise, there was often nobody for company except the fifteen-year-old Marguerite, who was beginning to take over more and more of the running of the household.
Removing Henri from the distractions of Montparnasse had unforeseen consequences for Amélie. Instead of retrieving her place at the centre of his life and work, she seemed in danger of losing him altogether. He was away for large parts of the week in Paris on gallery business, coping with his students, drawing from the live model in afternoon sessions at Colarossi’s, and attending the Steins’ evenings on the rue Madame. At home he spent days on end shut away in his studio at the far side of the garden, desperately trying to make up for lost time. A procession of visitors came by car or train from Paris, many of them foreigners whose languages Amélie didn’t speak, and who treated her, when they noticed her at all, as a dim, silent housewife. Society hostesses like Mrs. Chadbourne and Mrs. Sears made her feel defensive. Loud, self-confident intellectuals like Sarah Stein or Ottoline Morrell put her at a disadvantage. Even Gertrude Stein, who approved of Mme Matisse and took her part, relegated her firmly to the sphere of cooking, darning and childrearing. This was the fate Amélie had dreaded from girlhood, and at Issy it threatened to overwhelm her.
Jules Flandrin, sketch of Dance and Music, in a letter to his brother, 2 November 1910: Flandrin was one of the few to grasp at once the significance of his old friends scandalous submission to the Autumn Salon. (Top sketch: Félix Valloton’s Perseus and the Dragon)
His wife’s growing tension heightened the pressure on Matisse as he prepared Dance and Music for their first public showing at the Autumn Salon, which opened on 1 October 1910. The response was immediate and devastating. Crowds collected, jeering, catcalling and shouting insults in front of the two panels as they had done for three years running at the height of the Fauve upheaval. Old friends were dismayed by the new works, fellow artists were outraged. The reviews were so universally damning that Amélie had to hide them from her husband.62 Even the sympathetic Lewis Hind reported that the figures in Dance looked like cavemen (“startling, disconcerting, terrifically ugly in the conventional sense—essential Matisse”), and congratulated himself on being cured at last of an unpleasant addiction, until he realised that the rest of the Salon looked insipid by comparison: “Those two palaeolithic panels came drumming in my inner consciousness.… He will not be denied.… His personality overshadows the other exhibitors.… Death, I fancy, will find me still trying to explain Matisse.”63
Only Apollinaire stood out in print against the onslaught (Matisse, who had never forgiven him for failing Mécislas Golberg on his deathbed, said he would sooner have him for an enemy).64 This time Matisse was better prepared than he had been in February. Within a week of the opening, he left Paris for Munich to catch the last ten days of a major exhibition, “Masterpieces of Islamic Art.” Marquet travelled with him. Matthew Prichard, who had already spent six weeks studying the show, was waiting for them in Munich, and Purrmann joined them from his home in Speyer. Matisse’s friends did their best to distract and entertain him. He went drinking in the beer cellars with Purrmann, and accompanied him and Marquet to inspect the private collection of virtually his only supporter in the museum world, the director of Munich’s Staatsgalerie, Baron von Tschudi.65
But it was Prichard who supplied the most effective antidote. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for to demonstrate to Matisse the actual and potential power of Oriental art. The exhibition provided an unprecedented display of decoration in all its forms, from carpets, carvings, tiles, ceramics, enamelled glass and illuminated manuscripts to Byzantine metalwork and coins. The most striking thing about it, according to Roger Fry, was the way in which the perfunctory, mechanical formulae of late Graeco-Roman classicism gave way in the middle ages to an Oriental decorative art of astonishing subtlety and strength, “an art in which the smallest piece of pattern-making shows a tense vitality even in its most purely geometrical manifestations, and the figure is used with a new dramatic expressiveness unhindered by the artists’ ignorance of actual form.”66
Matisse was himself attempting to bypass an exhausted classical tradition by similar means. He and Prichard spent hours looking at the exhibition and talking about its implications. They discussed reality and illusion, the possibilities of large-scale public decoration, and the obtuseness of the contemporary art establishment. “A picture by Matisse is like the blast of the trumpet of the last judgement to them,” Prichard jotted down in his notebook.67 Their week together in Munich cemented their alliance as nothing else could have done. It would inform Matisse’s work, and direct his travels over the next three years. Asked afterwards what had impressed him most about the Islamic show, he singled out the textiles and the bronzes, which gave him the confirmation and support he could not get from contemporary art or artists. “You have to wait until you’re dealing with a dead lion,” he told Prichard in Munich. “If it’s still alive, it will devour you.”68
On the evening of 15 October, Matisse’s father died suddenly at home of a heart attack. Matisse left Munich immediately for Bohain, arriving in time to go with his younger brother Auguste to register the death.69 The family seed-store closed, and bells tolled throughout the town for the funeral on 19 October. Matisse needed courage to walk behind his father’s coffin at a moment when his activities had once again brought public shame and ridicule on the family name. His notoriety had soured the last years of his father’s life. Matisse said that by the end communication had shrunk to “How’s it going?” when his father met him with a trap at the station, and “Come again soon” when he took him back to catch the train to Paris.70
But Matisse’s father had seen him through years of penury and hunger, enduring derisive comments from the neighbours with a baffled sense that his elder son was neither dishonest nor mad, and certainly not stupid. As Matisse’s own two sons grew older, he understood more. He recognised his own unbudgeable determination in his father, and knew that his father had respected the same in him. They were proud, dour, obstinate people, who habitually covered emotion with the dry wit of their native North. When Matisse finally made good—or at any rate felt sufficiently secure at forty to rent his own place in the suburbs—he had shown his parents round the house and garden at Issy, drawing his father’s particular attention to the newly planted flowerbeds. “Why not grow something useful, like potatoes?” asked the seed-merchant.71
It remained a source of bitterness ever after that Henri Matisse Senior had died too soon to see his son justified, or to admit that a potato crop was not the only one worth growing. At the time, his death was a shattering blow. “I have been completely crushed ever since,”72 Matisse told a friend the week after the funeral. “I am utterly demolished by it,” he wrote to Biette.73 The family travelled back in deepest mourning to Issy, taking Henri’s widowed mother with them. Their return coincided with the Bernheims’ last valedictory show of work by Henri Cross, whose sufferings had finally ended in death at the beginning of the year. Cross had consoled and encouraged Matisse as his own father never could. “He was a man of the North,” wrote Maurice Denis, paying tribute to the passionate heart that beat beneath Cross’s cool exterior in a passage that might just as well have described Matisse:
He was born amid the mists of Flanders… and he settled on the Mediterranean coast. The whole of his artistic life lies between his dark start and his destination in the sun.… In his eyes—the pale eyes of a man of the North—shone all the luminosity of the Midi: it was reflected in his gaze, and its sparkling brilliance together with the emotion it inspired were in turn perpetuated in his work.74
Five days after the funeral, Matisse forced himself to look at his reviews. “How much rage they show,” he wrote sadly to Biette on 26 October. “Luckily I didn’t read them until the day before yesterday, because I’m going to have to show them to Shchukin. How far away it all seems—I only hope this indifference is genuine.”75 Shchukin had been taking a leisurely holiday in the south of France with a party that included his future second wife. By the time he reached Paris on 1 November, a week before the Salon closed, he had read enough about his decorative panels in the French press to be extremely worried.76 All his original misgivings about hanging nudes in public came back sharper than before. People were already saying in Moscow that his abnormal and degenerate taste in art had driven two of his sons to suicide. Now, as he was about to make a second marriage, he must have known that displaying Dance and Music on his stairs would expose his new wife and her two teenage children to scandal even worse than anything his first family had endured.
Matisse blamed the Bernheim brothers ever afterwards for what happened next. They came specially to Issy to tell him that Shchukin had rejected Dance and Music in favour of a work by Puvis de Chavannes which was too large to fit into their gallery. They asked him to lend his studio instead, so that the rival painting could be displayed in all its glory to its prospective owner. Matisse agreed at once. To have Shchukin refuse his panels after nearly two years during which he had thought of little else, at a moment when he was still reeling from the impact of his father’s death, was almost more than he could credit. Half a century later, his daughter recalled that day for her brother Pierre. “I remember very well the moment when our father said: ‘If Shchukin really looks at my work, I am bound to emerge the winner from this contest.’ But it was rather like a man stunned by a blow who gets up again by sheer willpower, using more of it than even he had ever needed to exert before.”77
Puvis’s The Muses Greeting Genius: The Herald of Light had been commissioned from one of the most prestigious painters in France to hang above the staircase in the magnificent new entrance hall of the Boston Public Library. The painting (a copy made by the master from his own original) was as much an allegory about art as either of Matisse’s panels, but it belonged to another world. Marguerite said that to a child brought up among the Fauves, its ghostly pallor and elegant, etiolated figures were shocking.78 But as a young man Shchukin himself had been, by his own account, “infatuated with Puvis.” Confronted in Matisse’s studio with the full enormity of what he had been about to do, he reverted to the idol of his youth. Puvis emerged the winner.
On 8 November, Shchukin caught the train for Moscow. Two days later he reversed his decision in a telegram dispatched from Warsaw station along the way, writing to explain that during the two days and two nights of his journey he had “come to feel ashamed of my weakness and lack of courage. One should not quit the field of battle without attempting combat.”79 It was a long, brave and extraordinarily honest letter. He confessed his youthful passion for Puvis, adding that the newly purchased painting no longer meant anything to him, that the Moscow Museum had refused to take it as a gift and that, even if Bernheim-Jeune declined to buy it back, he had learned his lesson and would count the money well lost. Matisse’s two panels were to be sent immediately.
Purrmann, who came to help roll and pack them, said that Matisse sprang back in panic when the figures on the two huge canvases laid out on the studio floor suddenly seemed to heave and stir beneath the baleful gaze of Puvis’s muses.80 Matisse still couldn’t take in what had happened. “If you remember, I didn’t fall to pieces,” he wrote, recalling the first shock a month later to his wife. “I made myself go rigid.”81 The whole family was deeply shaken by this affair, and by Matisse’s inability to absorb it. Gradually he came to see it as a characteristically short-term dealers’ ploy to cash in on a client’s indecision and bump up the profits that had so far failed to accrue from the Matisse contract, by off-loading an otherwise unsellable Puvis. “You couldn’t do that to Maurice Denis,” Matisse said long afterwards, remembering the shabby trick the Bernheims played on him.82 At the time it sickened and unnerved him. Years after her father’s death, Marguerite could still vividly recall “the memory of the state of anguish that possessed Matisse night and day from the moment when the Bernheims came to propose putting the Puvis in his studio to the moment when he received the letter written by Shchukin from the train.”83
The whole sorry business overshadowed the opening on 8 November of the London Post-Impressionist show, which drew fresh floods of startled and aggrieved vituperation from press and public (“Try is lifting them by the scalp,” Prichard reported cheerfully to Mrs. Stewart Gardner).84 For the third time that year, Matisse fled Paris, boarding a train in the opposite direction as soon as he had seen his panels safely onto the slow goods train for Moscow. He chose Spain, apparently on Prichard’s advice (“I’d been so messed about… over my decorations, I didn’t know if I was coming or going,” he explained to Biette. “It seemed to me the sun would do me good, someone suggested I come here, and I left”).85 He planned to follow up their talks in Munich by visiting the Alhambra, taking in on the way the Moorish palaces and mosques of Cordova, Seville and Granada.
He reached Madrid on Thursday, 17 November, in cold, wet weather, with his head spinning after twenty-six hours on the train. He drew himself huddled over the radiator on his first afternoon for Marquet: “I wanted to go out but here is how—and in what—I saw the Spanish, who aren’t always that good-looking,” he wrote, sketching a barrel-shaped Spaniard clutching an umbrella in driving rain.86 He said the people in the streets all looked like curés, or alternatively like lean, dark and handsome Henri Manguins. Two days later he rushed through the Prado, firing off a series of exuberant postcards to old friends. “Goya, Greco, Velasquez, Tintoretto, I’ll see the other jokers tomorrow. Why aren’t you here?” he asked Marquet. “Magnificent weather—picturesque views—Prado exquisite—hope it keeps up,” he told Manguin on 22 November.
On the 24th he moved on via Cordova to Seville, where the sun came out. “It’s wonderful, and so is the temperature!”87 he wrote to Amélie. In Madrid, he had run across an old acquaintance from student days, Francisco Iturrino, a dashing, gaunt, grave Spaniard who had been much painted at the turn of the century by Parisian romantics (including both Picasso and Derain). Iturrino was on his way to Seville, where Matisse found another hospitable old friend, Auguste Bréal, leading an idyllic life in an apartment built round a pillared courtyard with palm trees and a fountain in the middle.88 Bréal, who showed him round the town and introduced him to flamenco, proved a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide to Spanish life and culture. Matisse collected old glazed Moorish tiles (including a blue-and-white, seventh-century tile from Iznik which he would draw in 1915), sending a packet of them back to Issy together with two cases of local pottery for the garden. He bought a fine piece of antique glass for Amélie, and a cream-coloured woollen rug with a dark blue design for himself (“It caught my eye in an antique shop in Madrid… it’s not in a very good state, but I’ll be able to work a lot with it, I think.… I’ve never seen anything like it”).89
After a few days, he moved into Breál’s club on the main square, the only adequately heated quarters in the whole of Seville, according to Matisse, who grumbled mildly to his wife about the lack of stoves and the fact that no one ever dreamed of closing doors or windows. The only snag about this elegant club was that he felt so out of place in his shabby old clothes he had to ask Amélie to post him his one decent coat (taking the precaution of having it relined first, so that he wouldn’t stand out too much among the chic and beautifully groomed Spaniards). He described himself lying late in bed in the mornings with palm fronds waving gently against a blue sky outside his window. “I’m basking in the sun here,” he wrote to Charles Camoin on 3 December,90 and to Manguin, “Long live wine, women and tobacco!”91
The reality behind these cards and letters was very different. Matisse was functioning on autopilot. The various accounts he gave at the end of his life describe almost complete physical and emotional breakdown in his first weeks in Spain. He said he had been living on clenched nerves for so long that they could not be unwound. The last straw had been the shock of the Bernheims’ treachery, which only began to sink in once he reached Madrid, where, to his surprise, he failed to sleep on his first night. From then on insomnia exacerbated his inner turmoil. He had not slept for more than a week by the time he reached Seville in a state of near collapse. After the first few days, the weather deteriorated into torrential rainstorms fiercer than he had ever seen before. “Seville is a town turned in on itself, where everyone shivers with cold,” he told Pierre Courthion in retrospect.92 The chill that gripped him body and soul made him tremble so violently that his metal bedstead drummed on the tiled floor of his room. “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”93
He stayed indoors, sick and feverish, dosing himself with laudanum, until rescued by Bréal, who booked an appointment with his own doctor on 6 December, and promptly moved the patient into his house on the Calle Imperial to be nursed according to a strict regime. The doctor prescribed rest, tranquillisers and warm baths three times a day, warning that fear of not sleeping made sleep even more problematic. Amélie had said the same for years. Matisse owed much to this shrewd and sensitive Spanish doctor, who explained that there was nothing clinically wrong with him, that black despair would inevitably follow bouts of such intense nervous pressure and emotional exhilaration, and that all he could do was learn to manage his condition by sticking to a regular work schedule, and by being less exacting towards himself (“All artists have this particular make-up, that’s what makes them artists, but with me it’s a bit excessive,” Matisse told his wife, adding optimistically, “perhaps that’s what gives their quality to my pictures”).94 The first part of this advice became Matisse’s rule for the rest of his life, but he failed, if he ever tried, to follow the second.
The worst of the crisis was now over. “My dear Mélo,” Matisse wrote on 8 December, using his wife’s pet name and describing his recovery in terms he normally reserved for the great symbolic liberations of his youth, like his first paint-box or his first sight of the southern sun: “Suddenly I understood my case so clearly that it’s changed me, it’s as if I’d been saved.”95 He felt a familiar surge of energy and release. Free at last to pursue the purpose of his journey, he left for Granada the next day. The train had a special semicircular, glass viewing compartment, where Matisse sat alone from ten in the morning until eight o’clock at night, entranced by the fertile Andalusian plain (“palm trees, eucalyptus, pomegranates and orange trees, the walls of the houses and villas hung with vivid purple morning glories and dark green foliage”), and by the harsh dry mountains of the Sierra Nevada (“a poor country where the poor people in the towns—and there are many of them—swarm around the train to beg whenever it stops”). He reached Granada in another howling downpour, and took a room in a pension, where he spent Saturday waiting for the storm to pass. The pension was outside the town, close to the Alhambra, surrounded by huge elms described by Baedeker as a sacred grove (“Sacred it may be, but I can tell you it’s swearing like a heathen at the moment, because the wind is strong enough to de-horn the bulls of Andalusia, and they’re pretty solid, those horns”).96 On Sunday, 11 December, he reached his goal. “The Alhambra is a marvel,” he wrote to Amélie that evening. “I felt the greatest emotion there.”
Postcard of the Sala de las Camas brought back by Matisse from the Alhambra
Amélie had forwarded to Granada an urgent request for a pair of large still lifes from Shchukin (who hoped that something relatively straightforward and easy on the eye might help to lessen the inevitable public outcry over Dance and Music). Arriving in that place at that moment, the commission affected Matisse like a starting pistol. “Ideas have come to me here…,” he wrote on Sunday night to Amélie. “I could see the two of them already complete, but done here.” He allowed himself only one more full day at Granada to continue the exploration begun with Prichard in Munich. The brevity of this encounter if anything intensified its impact. The courts and palaces of the Alhambra, its pierced screens and shuttered spaces, its rhythmic variations on the theme of inside/outside, its counterpoint of form and colour, dark and light, riotous pattern and restful intervals of sky or water, found echoes ever afterwards in Matisse’s imagination.
Part fortress, part paradise on earth, constructed at the time of the Crusades when the mediaeval collision between East and West reached its height over a century of almost unimaginable violence and aggression, the Alhambra embodies Islam’s dream of harmony, peace and luxury. A parallel vision lies at the core of Matisse’s work. He first encapsulated it in the notorious image of an armchair designed to soothe a harassed businessman. Later he would identify for Prichard the particular businessman he had in mind: “He instanced the case of Shchukin, who after his day’s work and trouble sat in his drawing-room where he proceeded to forget his worries under the influence of Matisse’s pictures, which have a calming tendency.”97
The letter Matisse dashed off to Amélie from Granada on the night of 11 December makes it clear that the two new works for Shchukin’s drawing room were conceived in the Alhambra. He responded with the passionate, instinctive force of his whole being to the inner quietude secreted within a fantastic decorative profusion perfected, in the words of Roger Fry, by “systems of Mohammedan design so skilfully interwoven, so subtly adapted to their purpose, that the supremacy of Mohammedan art in this particular form has been recognised and perpetuated in the word Arabesque.”98 More than forty years later, Matisse acknowledged that he had been possessed at this point by a love of line and of the arabesque—”those givers of life”99—which stirred his senses and appeased his spirit.
On Tuesday, 13 December, he caught the train, arriving back in Seville late at night, still cold and wet, still plagued intermittently by sleeplessness, but with his weakness shot through by elation. He found a letter waiting for him from Georgette Sembat, urging him to ignore the critics, whose spleen would turn to admiration in ten years, and comparing him to J. D. Ingres:
Its his correspondence, where he is thinking aloud, and where at every turn it seemed to me it might have been you writing—especially when he senses his own power and feels sure of himself, knowing he is doing the opposite of his contemporaries, and certain he will succeed in producing something new, and then he receives at Rome the terrible, spiteful, slashing reviews of his work at the Salon, and weeps with rage, suffering all the same and rebelling, crying aloud his misery at the injustice they have done him, it’s very vivid and very true—in spite of his confidence in himself, in spite of your confidence in your work, you cant help suffering at seeing yourself judged like that, even if it is by people you despise.100
The day after he reached Seville, Matisse hired a studio for a month, laid out a still life (colour fig. 6) (including the cream-and-blue quilt that had captivated him in Madrid), and set to work without waiting for the brushes, palette knife and paints he had sent for from home. The two paintings he produced in quick succession for Shchukin marked a fresh departure. The thinness of the paint and the speed of execution testify, as Alfred Barr noted dryly, to “Matisse’s excitement when confronted by the problem of controlling and harmonising such a bedlam of assertive patterns.”101 European and Oriental concepts of decoration confront one another on these canvases. The layout and its components—fruit, flowers, vegetables, a green-glazed local pot and half a dozen newly acquired textiles—represent the standard still-life paraphernalia of Western painting, but the rhythmic overall fluidity of swirling line and brilliant colour belong to another world. “In Eastern friezes the drawing combines with the background in a single ornamental design, a decorative whole, a great vibrating carpet. Such are the arabesques of Tunis, Algeria and the Alhambra palace,” wrote the Russian critic Jacob Tugendhold, assessing Shchukin’s collection a few years later, “and it is just this lack of distinction between the ‘design’ and the background that is the characteristic feature of Matisse’s work.… Matisse’s painting has none of the solemnity of High Art, but it has a gaiety of its own that has less to do with the decorative-architectonic Renaissance tradition than with decorative purity in the oriental sense.”102
Matisse had borrowed paints and brushes from Iturrino, who shared the studio, setting up his easel alongside his French friends to paint his own two versions of the same still life (Iturrino would make a comeback with Matisse’s help at the Autumn Salon that year in Paris). The pair attended a drawing club together in the evenings, and were photographed beside the river Guadalquivir by Bréal, who also found them a live model: a dancer with black hair, high cheekbones and strong, expressive features, called Joaquina.103 Matisse, whose life had for so long revolved around the dance, was fascinated by the gypsy dancers of Seville. He never forgot a sixteen-year-old called Dora—”a miracle of suppleness and rhythm”—who made the toast of Paris, Isadora Duncan, seem brash and unsubtle by comparison, more of a gymnast than a dancer. Dora “revealed to me what the dance could be.… I compared her to the celebrated Is. Duncan, whose gestures cut across the flow of the music, where Dora by contrast prolonged the sound with her arabesques.”104
Matisse, Joaquina, 1910: the Spanish dancer who posed for Matisse and his two friends in Seville
The three canvases he painted with Iturrino were the only ones Matisse produced in Spain. Looking back afterwards, he reckoned that his crisis lasted in the end for a month and a half. Insomnia had dogged him until the last night of the year, which was his forty-first birthday. Its approach made him feel old as well as lonely. Missing his friends, thinking sadly of his mother, he reached out to his wife, begging her to write and get the children to write too (“The little wretches couldn’t care less about their father, or his forties”).105 He saw everything in Seville through a haze of exhaustion. Although he reached his studio every morning at ten, palpitations and rising fever forced him to stop work after half an hour, or forty-five minutes at the most (“All the rest of the time I dragged my fatigue and revulsion round with me”).106 It was only back in Paris that his two still lifes surprised him: “I saw they weren’t too bad… they were the product of nervous tension.”
Matisse marked the new year of 1911 with a long, sombre letter to Biette, tracing the history of the panels commissioned by Shchukin (“A commission is more horrible than desirable for certain temperaments”), for which he said he had moved heaven and earth over two years.107 He attributed the assaults that followed to jealousy, intensified by a sense that Matisse had somehow managed to collar for himself the lavish Russian funding that should by rights have enriched the entire Parisian art market. “So now I ask myself if these panels are really important enough to motivate aggression on a scale that still surprises me, and which maybe I couldn’t stand—,” he wrote, breaking off in a flurry of crossings-out as he contemplated a possible recurrence. He looked back longingly to his beginnings as an unknown young artist experimenting at Collioure in the summer of 1905. The events of the past year confirmed his resolution to have nothing more to do with the manipulative world of art politics. “Now I have decided to reject the over-importance that has been given me, and that perhaps I let myself be given, and to continue on my way without that sort of complication.”
This letter was written a month after the publication of the most vicious of all the attacks of 1910, “The Prince of the Fauves” by Roland Dorgelès, who repeated all the old racist slurs, accusing Matisse of greed and cynicism, and gloating over the graffiti campaign organised by Picasso’s band on the walls of Montmartre (“Matisse drives you mad! Matisse is more dangerous than alcohol! Matisse does more harm than war!”).108 The memory of this article stayed with Matisse for the rest of his life. “That he had been terribly wounded in the past was obvious,” wrote an English artist, C. R. W. Nevinson, impressed by the philosophical detachment the older painter had achieved by the time they met a decade later: “He told me how his wife used to hide the press cuttings from him, as the dirtiness of the art criticism drove him to distraction.”109 Matisse knew by now that his only hope of survival as an artist lay in stripping down his life as he had stripped down his work, centreing his existence on the studio and establishing a working rhythm that would enable him to live with the hostility of others, above all to endure the ravages of his own unquiet temperament. “The public is against you,” Shchukin wrote from Moscow, reporting the arrival of the two panels that winter, “but the future is yours.”110
