Alvin Langdon Coburn, Henri and Amélie Matisse in the Studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux with the Unfinished “Bathers by a River;” May 1913
It was in 1913 that the first full-throated roar rose from America in opposition to modern European art,” wrote Janet Flanner. describing the impact of the exhibition that introduced New York, Chicago and Boston for the first time to current trends in painting and sculpture.1 Traffic jammed Lexington Avenue outside the disused armory in Manhattan where the show opened in February, and queues formed inside the building. Henri Matisse was generally agreed to be the ringleader in this den of lewdness, profanity and pollution. The New York Times famously pronounced his works ugly, coarse, narrow and revolting in their inhumanity. Students from the Art Institute of Chicago planned to celebrate the day the exhibition left their city by hanging Matisse in effigy. When the authorities intervened, a huge crowd of students burned copies of his most offensive works. Le Luxe and Blue Nude and went on to stage a public trial for treason of Henry Hairmattress (“Artist Hairmattress… was stabbed and otherwise thoroughly killed and dragged about,” reported the Chicago Examiner on 17 April).2 A representative of the Senate Vice Committee confirmed that the exhibition was immoral.
“The dry bones of a dead art are rattling as they never rattled before,” Alfred Stieglitz wrote happily.3 “We are going to put a mark on American thought that will be simply indelible” Walter Pach told Gertrude Stein.4 By the time they had finished, a quarter of a million people had visited the Armory Show in New York alone, and the disruptive energy of modern art was firmly established in the public mind. This huge show of sixteen hundred works, ranging from Ingres (still barely known in the United States) to Matisse’s work-in-progress (Back I, the first of a sculpture sequence that preoccupied him at intervals over the next two decades), was a rush job, hurriedly assembled in a few months by a group of artists with no official funding, no institutional backing and no professional experience in the field. Neither its president, Arthur B. Davies, nor Pach. who was his European talent scout, ever got anywhere near the top class themselves as painters, but between them they inaugurated a century of American modernist collecting in the grand style together with a tradition of swashbuckling, groundbreaking, no-holds-barred exhibitions. Like Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist shows in London, the Armory Show opened doors for young artists who otherwise had no access to anything but academic art. “The impact of Cézanne. Gauguin, Matisse etc on my horizon was equivalent to the impact of the scientists of this age upon a simple student of Sir Isaac Newton,” wrote the Londoner Mark Gertler. speaking for the first generation of twentieth-century painters to come of age before World War I.5
Matisse himself was well aware that any prospect of finding a public for his work depended on supporters like Pach, Fry and Shchukin. “I work entirely for America, England and Russia,” he had told a Moscow reporter in 1911.6 He might by now have added Germany as well. In May 1913, his Moroccan paintings touched down en route to Russia at Fritz Gurlitt’s gallery in Berlin, which gave him a second one-man show six months later. In October Shchukin received a delegation of eight German museum directors, all doctors of philosophy, all hailing Matisse as a modern master, and all asking where to buy his work.7 Neue Kunst, Kandinsky’s Munich dealers, planned to mount a Matisse show in the spring but were preempted by Gurlitt, already working on a major retrospective scheduled for Berlin in July 1914.8
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Matisse seemed to have been sidelined. His brief preview at Bernheim-Jeune of work verging on twentieth-century abstraction roused little or no interest in an art scene mesmerised by the Cubist take on nineteenth-century realism. Cubism was fast becoming mandatory. The Chamber of Deputies debated whether or not the new movement posed a national threat. Artists who couldn’t get the hang of it often preferred not to show their work at all, “for fear,” as Jules Flandrin said, “of looking slow and awkward beside sharper and more fluent colleagues.”9 Matisse had initially coined the term “Cubism” as a putdown, according to Apollinaire, who implied with relish that the joke had now seriously backfired. Matisse’s own work still looked like a freak show to the public, the art establishment and disgruntled revolutionaries from a previous era (“I can just see Sembat putting Matisse on a golden pedestal,” grumbled one of Signac’s henchmen on hearing of the article that accompanied the show).10 But more up-to-date observers tended either to write him off as a spent force or to lump him with the reactionaries on the grounds that anyone not lined up alongside the Cubists or the Futurists was against them.
One contemporary who never underestimated Matisse was Picasso, himself increasingly disconcerted by the mass of crude, trite or flashy imitations currently flooding the market under the Cubist label. In the summer of 1913 the two drew closer than they had ever been before. Each had reached the end of one experimental stage and was ready for the next. Picasso’s analytical phase—so rigorous that Shchukin said just entering the room where he hung his Cubist canvases made him feel as if he had put his foot in a bucket of broken glass11—would be followed that summer by the invention of the Cubist collage. Each felt isolated by his achievements. Picasso was anxious to distance himself from his crowd of followers; Matisse had taken steps to ensure that he had none. No one was better placed to sympathise with Picasso’s predicament, which mirrored Matisse’s own revulsion a few years earlier at sub-Fauve excesses. Somewhat to their own surprise (as well as other peoples), the two found themselves comparing notes, exchanging ideas and discussing technical problems. When Picasso went down with fever in July, Matisse came into Paris to sit with him, bringing fruit, flowers and funny stories. In August, Picasso took the train to Clamart to join Matisse on his daily rides through the woods. For Picasso, who was no horseman and detested appearing at a disadvantage, this was the equivalent of a public gesture of reconciliation between leaders of two warring countries. Each promptly wrote to inform Gertrude Stein, who had done more than anyone to foment and publicise the rivalry between them.12
Sembat said it was round about this time that he heard one or other of them—”Whether it was Picasso, or whether it was Matisse, I dont know or care”—make a much-quoted remark: “We are both searching for the same thing by opposite means.”13 In the summer of 1913 their ways and means briefly converged. Matisse had come to what was always a turning point in his internal battles, the climax when feeling seized control of his work. He had reached it in Toulouse in 1899, in Collioure in 1905, in Tangier in 1911–12. What both repelled and attracted him about Cubism was precisely its analytic content, the dry cerebral aspect that contrasted so sharply with the passionate impulses of his own divided character. “Of course Cubism interested me,” he said long afterwards, “but it did not speak directly to my deeply sensuous nature, to such a great lover as I am of line and of the arabesque, those two life-givers.”14 In Morocco he had pushed that side of himself as far as it could go. Now it was time for a drastic change of course.
Matisse Back II, 1913
The four major projects he worked on through the summer at Issy looked to other people like wilful exercises in human disfigurement and deformity. All but one were serial experiments started three or four years earlier, and each of these proved such tough going that it had to be set aside to be continued later. The earliest was Bathers by a River, which Matisse had initially sketched out as a companion for Shchukin’s Dance and Music, and now proposed recasting as a Moroccan beach scene.15 He erected a gigantic canvas that filled a whole wall in his studio but got no further than repositioning his four larger-than-life-size bathers in a provisional layout finalised only three years later. Perhaps he was waylaid by a related work, the massive plaster Back I which gave rise on its return from the Armory Show to a still more monolithic Back II
Matisse, Jeannette (V): the “bust with the tapir’s nose” that defeated even the most sophisticated visitors to the studio at Issy
Matisse’s third project was more worrying than either of the other two at this stage. He returned to a set of busts of Jeanne Vaderin. a model whose portrait he had also painted as the shy, charming Girl with Tulips of 1910. The first two busts were inoffensive, semi-impressionistic studies of a perfectly conventional young lady, but in two more, made a year later, he recklessly exaggerated the liberties he had taken in his painted portrait with her hair, nose and the tilt of her head. “The sculptor goes after the gargoyle in human nature,” the New York Evening Post said reprovingly of Jeannette III when it went on show at Stieglitz’s gallery in 1912.16 In 1913, Matisse began to pummel the clay for a Jeannette V of such extreme distortion that even the most sophisticated customers found it hard to stomach.
“I confess to you in a small voice, M. Matisse,” wrote one of them, “that I could not follow you when you said: ‘This profile, apparently so unformed, even horse-like—viewed from here, from this angle, doesn’t it suggest to you the idea of freshness and youth?’ I became evasive.”17 The diplomatic young visitor was Robert Rey (who went on to become successively curator at the Luxembourg Museum, professor at the Louvre and Inspector General for the Ministry of Beaux-Arts). He claimed to have come to his appointment at Issy as to an initiation, expecting to be given a magic key to the mystery of Matisse’s deformed figures and hallucinogenic colours by the artist himself, whom he pictured as a noble savage, clothed in hair and animal skins. Pach said people often travelled all the way to Issy just to check out what Matisse looked like (“They were always reassured by his appearance”).18 Another young American, Henry McBride, remembered a terrifying occasion that summer when he motored out with a party headed by Gertrude Stein and her fearlessly outspoken friend Mildred Aldrich, to find Matisse waiting for them with four pictures, which they looked at in mounting disbelief, relapsing finally into panic-stricken silence. “At last Miss Aldrich blurted out, ‘I—I dont quite understand that,’ said she; or rather, she said: ‘Je—je ne comprends pas ça.’ ‘Moi non plus’ [‘Me neither’], replied Matisse coolly, lighting a cigarette as though nothing had happened.”19
This was the provoking, punitive Henry Hairmattress hellbent on driving ordinary people wild. When bewildered onlookers protested that no human being resembled the creatures of his imagination, Matisse agreed, adding cheerfully that if he met one in the street, he would probably flee in terror. Meanwhile his house was booby-trapped with shocks for the unwary. First-time visitors, already rattled by the bulging foreheads and staring eyes of the African carvings in the drawing room (“Wooden fetishes surround you and seem to follow you”),20 were nearly always floored, when they crossed the garden to his studio, by the Bathers or the Backs (“Vast neo-Assyrian bas reliefs which Matisse cuts out of enormous planks of plaster”), and what Rey called “the bust with the tapir’s nose.” Again and again people who reached Issy in the years immediately before 1914 made it sound as if they had stepped into the future: a strange, scary, savage world that filled them with foreboding and disquiet. “We see as ‘frightful’ what Matisse sees as suave,” wrote Rey, too subtle and far too intelligent to misunderstand what he had seen, however much he might dislike it. “The contemplation of extreme novelty cannot please a man whose taste is already formed, because he sees in it signs of an evolution that no longer depends on him, something like an announcement of death.”
Shchukin, who had long since got over his own qualms about the future, came in June or July to catch up with developments in the studio, and ask hopefully about the four canvases still needed to complete the top tier of paintings in his drawing room. Matisse set to work to fill the gap, starting with a canvas that gave more trouble than the rest of his programme put together. He worked on it for the rest of the summer without a break, except for the rides that had become a daily habit in Tangier. Matisse rode regularly with friends like Picasso, with Michael Stein and his son Allen, or with his own three children in the school holidays, on ponies from the riding stable known as Robinson at Clamart. Soon he switched to hiring horses by the month, stabling them in an outhouse next to the studio so they would be ready before or after painting sessions. Riding was his only respite from work on the subject commissioned—perhaps even suggested (like Family Portrait)—by Shchukin. “I’ve just finished a picture that has exhausted me,” Matisse wrote at the end of October to his mother. “Luckily it’s a good one—they say it’s one of my best—but it didn’t come easily; it’s three months now that I’ve been working on it. It’s for Shchukin; it’s a portrait of Amélie.”21
The new painting drove him frantic. By the time he finished it his nerves had been at snapping point for weeks. “Saturday with Matisse,” Marcel Sembat wrote in his diary on 21 September. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!”22 All his life Matisse reverted to the paternosters of his childhood to calm himself when rage and frustration threatened to overwhelm him. His family learned to keep their distance at these times. The portrait of his wife brought on palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.23 His mother also suffered another crisis that summer, presumably a stroke or minor heart attack brought on, in her sons view, by her own folly and imprudence. “If I were feeling stronger, and if I had a bit more authority over you, I’d come and sort out your house myself,” Henri wrote in exasperation, “and barricade off the whole of the first floor—which is no use to you—so don’t start that again—you don’t need to do this sort of thing to live—you don’t need to economise in ways that leave you laid up for a couple of months, and end by costing you a hundred times more in doctors’ bills etc.”24
Matisse understood well enough his mother’s obstinacy, and her inability to stop work before she dropped. He thought gloomily of other low points in his own life. Bitter memories of Tangier flooded back with the autumn storms at Issy (“It rained so hard that my wife and I, lying in bed, each thought of the famous Room no. 38, from which we once watched it rain for a month and a half’).25 By this time Marguerite had returned to her aunt in Corsica. The boys had also gone back to boarding school (Pierre was despatched the term after his twelfth birthday to join Jean at the Collège de Noyon), leaving their parents face-to-face with each other in the studio.
Portrait sittings took place daily, and sometimes twice a day. Amélie posed for her husband seated in a rattan chair wearing a plain dark suit with a scarf or stole and a chic little ostrich-feather toque topped by a perky feather and a pink flower: a frivolous Parisian hat at the furthest extreme from the austere and sombre gravity of the painting. Matisse, who had seen Cézanne’s Woman in a Yellow Armchair on show in Paris in May, gave Amélie the same touching composure as Cézanne found in his own
Matisse, Portrait of Mme Matisse, 1913: the valedictory painting that took over a hundred sittings, and made the sitter weep when she saw it
wife, a tenderness of feeling inherent in the shell-like oval of the face and the slight, graceful inclination of the head.26 But Amélie Matisse, in her husband’s portrait, has an elegance and an unyielding, stony stoicism all her own. She leans forward against sharp greens on a blue ground, her head and body painted ash grey, as if her masklike face were covered by a grey veil and her hands sheathed in grey suede gloves. The painting expresses perhaps more movingly than any other what Matisse meant when he located emotion at the core of his art. It is suffused with the feelings that had to be mastered, refined and transmitted to canvas where, as he so often said in letters to his family, everything of any real importance happened.
It was a harsh and inhuman process, even when the subject was an acquaintance or hired model. In Portrait of Mme Matisse, the airy poise and delicacy of the Moroccan figure paintings overlay, perhaps even intensify, a residue of suffering. It took over a hundred sittings to reach this clarity and purity of expression. The portrait was finished as the winter closed in at Issy. a time of year that felt like “the equivalent of a demi-suicide” to Matisse, who for three years running had fled the country at this point in pursuit of painting.27 Each of his departures had precipitated a crisis in his marriage. This year the couple stayed at home together so that Matisse could subject his wife to the ruthless scrutiny he brought to bear on Bathers by a River, the Backs and the Jeannette busts.
The portrait became a mutual reckoning, demanding intense concentration from both painter and sitter. In fifteen years together, the dynamics of their marriage had shifted irretrievably. During that period, Matisse had changed from an unknown young art student into one of the two key innovators to whom the art world looked for leadership from New York to Moscow. He had built up a circle of energetic and responsive supporters, radiating out from the Sembats and Sarah Stein in Paris through Prichard to movers and shakers like Fry in London, Purrmann in Germany. Pach and his associates in the United States. He had a home of his own with ample working space, a viable income and, in Shchukin. a collector and curator unequivocally committed to his work. The couple had finally reached the goal that had seemed virtually unattainable when Amélie first gave him her backing: the point at which, in theory at any rate, Matisse’s only problems were pictorial.
But Amélie had not foreseen the corollary, which was that her contribution to the partnership was no longer needed. The nerve, courage and energy that made her invaluable in any kind of crisis were largely surplus to requirements in a settled future centred on children, home and garden. She had been the rock on which Matisse’s work depended, and pride now forbade her to settle for the lesser role of public consort or studio hostess. She chose instead to abdicate, delegating the running of the house and studio from now on more and more to Marguerite. Accounts by visitors to Issy in these years make virtually no mention of the painter’s wife, who remained invisible, absent, often ill, obliterated by the renunciations he had warned her long ago that painting would exact.
Amélie wept when she saw her portrait. Perhaps she remembered sitting for her husband in a toreador outfit early in their marriage, and the tension that had ended then in tears of fury followed by laughter and reconciliation. Portrait of Mme Matisse commemorates a stillness and withdrawal at the opposite extreme from the bold, frank, challenging gaze of Woman with a Hat eight years before. These two portraits mark the beginning and the end of the heroic years of active collaboration between husband and wife. Over the next twelve months or so Matisse produced a fierce sketch of her confronting him in a helmetlike hat with a striped veil that looks like bars across her face, and a beautiful, spare etching showing her stooped and sad, clutching her Japanese kimono with her head bent in a gesture of resignation or defeat. The couple would remain together for another quarter of a century,
Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1915: probably the last time the painter’s wife posed for him
but he never painted her again. It was as if she had given him everything she could, and he had acknowledged the gift in his great elegiac portrait with all the skill and passion at his command. For him. in years to come, the memory of this painting had the valedictory sweetness of a pressed flower: “the one that made you cry,” he said, reminding his wife a decade later, “but in which you look so pretty.”28
The ordeal of the sittings in the summer and autumn of 1913 drained them both. Amélie left as soon as it was over to join her mother-in-law and the boys assembled in Bohain on 1 November, the Feast of All Saints, to lay flowers on their grandfather’s grave. Henri stayed behind alone at Issy because, as he told his mother, “I can do without grief at this moment—especially since it cures nothing, and I dont need a cemetery to make me think of those I have lost.”29 Portrait of Mme Matisse was his only submission to the Autumn Salon, which opened on 15 November. “It didn’t come easily,” the painter wrote the same month to his daughter. “I could well say, in showing it, this is my flesh and my blood.”30
Madame Matisse may have slipped away, but the impact of her portrait was immediate and lasting. It impressed both Prichard and Shchukin (who returned to Paris to see it finally completed). Apollinaire recognised it as a masterpiece.31 Although it disappeared to Russia as soon as the Salon closed, it continued to exert a powerful influence in black-and-white reproduction on younger painters like Pach, who knew it only from photographs.32 It represented a bright new world to the next generation in the shape of the precocious schoolboy Louis Aragon, who saw it in a magazine (“If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, wretched boy,” said his mother, “you’re lost”), and his friend, the seventeen-year-old André Breton, who cut it out to pin up above his bed.33
Restlessness overtook Matisse that winter. By December, the temperature had fallen to six degrees below freezing, light was beginning to fade in his studio at Issy by three o’clock in the afternoon, and frost lay on the garden thick and white as snowfall. He was torn between the longing to get away and an inner voice that told him he needed to stay put to consolidate what he had begun. He toyed with the idea of renting a friend’s studio in Montparnasse, while making simultaneous plans to escort his mother south to Menton and find a spot along the coast where he could settle down to paint. Destinations wavered between Collioure, Ajaccio and Barcelona. By Christmas, he and Amélie had packed their bags for Morocco, only to unpack them again when Matisse dropped in at his old digs on the fifth floor at 19 quai St-Michel, now occupied by Albert Mar-quet, who told him that the flat below was vacant. “I visited it. I liked it immediately. The low ceilings gave a particular light, warmed by the sun reflected off the walls opposite (the Prefecture of Police). Instead of leaving for Tangier, the trunks came to Quai St-Michel.”34
The new flat was modest in size but well suited to the relatively small pictures he had in mind to paint. He described it to his daughter on 26 December: “Main room with two windows opening on the quay, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, hall—well laid out—rent 1300 francs—-so I took it, realising at last that this was what I wanted—your mother, who found the idea extraordinary to start with, is quite happy now.” Considering how lonely and despondent his wife had been at Issy, Matisse was no doubt correct in saying she was glad to get away. But the fact that he made up his mind without apparently consulting her, or even showing her the flat, suggests how far she had already moved towards the periphery of his life. The desire and need to paint were the only things he consulted now. He set aside thirty-six hours to accompany his mother to Marseilles, seeing her onto the next train for Menton and pausing just long enough to dash off his surprising news in a letter to Marguerite, before rushing back to Paris to reorganise his life.
He and Amélie moved into the new flat on 1 January 1914, the day after his forty-fourth birthday, taking their big double bed, their most precious pictures, Henri’s violin and the piano with them. The maid, Marie, had a cubbyhole in the attic, and there were two makeshift beds, one in the dining room and the other in the studio at the front, for the boys on their monthly weekends home from school. Jean and Pierre were growing fast (“They’re as tall as men now,” their father told Marguerite, “real men”), but they were well trained in studio routines and, by the time their sister got home at Easter, the family would have moved back to the country. Meanwhile the Issy property was left in charge of the washerwoman, who moved in as caretaker for 50 francs a week. Matisse was now back where he had started (except that, as a penniless art student, he had been able to afford no more than a half share in a sixth-floor maid’s room like Marie’s). Apart from seven years of family life, he had spent virtually his entire adult existence in the same building opposite Notre Dame on the left bank of the Seine in the shabby, noisy, crowded, lively heart of Paris.
Matisse felt more at home in this small rented studio flat than he ever had living in semibourgeois state at Issy. After a couple of months he told his mother he was working hard and sleeping better now that he had moved back to the quai. He also spelt out for her the triumphant vindication of modern art by André Level’s Peau d’Ours syndicate, which had bought up works for practically nothing ten years earlier from poor painters like himself, and now resold them at a handsome profit in a well-publicised sale on 2 March. Matisse’s Still Life with Eggs, painted in his mothers kitchen and sold in 1904 for 400 francs in cash (which had seemed such untold wealth at the time that friends suspected him of having killed to get it), fetched 2,400. Buyers paid 5,000 francs for an early still life, and another 1,850 for Studio Under the Eaves, the small, dark, richly charged canvas painted in an attic at the height of the Humbert scandal, when Matisse’s parents had had to endure ridicule and disgrace for harbouring their son in Bohain. “It’s a great success, more significant than a gold medal at the Salon,” he assured his mother, an allusion neither would have missed to his father’s lifelong disappointment in him, and his own humiliating history in his home town.35
At the end of March he attended a fancy-dress ball with Marquet and Camoin, all three happily reliving the days when they draped themselves in bedsheets, with fake beards and burnt-cork moustaches, for artists’ parties.36 This time they set out dressed as white-robed Archimandrites (or possibly Renaissance popes), planning to astound the company
Van Dongens fancy-dress ball, 1912: Matisse squatting right of centre with Camoin and Marquet behind him in suggestive homemade costumes
by revealing themselves kitted out underneath as fairground strongmen in stripey trunks with padded calves and highly suggestive, long, floppy truncheons. Their get-up was a backhanded compliment to their host, Kees van Dongen, who had just scandalised the Autumn Salon with a saucy, sexy picture of a girl throwing open her cloak to show herself nude underneath. Matisse sent Camoin a sketch of the offending work, which had been removed from the show with maximum publicity for the artist and embarrassment for the authorities. Van Dongen, who had moved rapidly upmarket from his early days as a meat porter, now turned out to possess a stylish studio at a smart address, with a well-heeled society clientele who attended his party en masse, to the consternation of his old friends in tacky homemade costumes. The three of them were hopelessly out of place, as Matisse explained with relish when he told this story later, in a crowd of fashionable Pierrots and Pierrettes, soigné Arab sheikhs and haute-couture Greek gods (Paul Poiret came as a gilded Bacchus)
Matisse, sketch of Van Dongen’s sexy picture seized by the police at the 1913 Autumn Salon
The beginning of 1914 was one of the periodic points when Matisse stripped his life back to essentials. He also pared his work down, starting with three teenage girls and a stone subject. The familiar, looming mass of Notre Dame outside his window became evanescent on his canvas, its solidity transformed into a weightless, see-through, floating cube enclosed in black shadows, lines or scratchings on a sky-blue ground. A patch of pink paint in one corner conveys a sudden intense wintry blaze of sunshine on stone far more vividly than the naturalistic canvas, almost identical in size and structural format, which he painted at the same time. The more conventional view appealed to everyone except the Sembats, who preferred the bolder painting: “For us it is the finer of the two, the more appealing, the one in which Matisse is the more personal.”37 Prichard correctly predicted that the process of compression and elision in this hard-edged, proto-abstract canvas would make it a classic, “in the sense that it typifies a new formula.”38
Prichard haunted the studio at quai St-Michel as he had at Issy, looking eagerly for a future that would obliterate the folly and blindness of the present. He was in no doubt about the momentous changes taking shape on Matisse’s canvases: “What has happened is that we are being taught a new vision.”39 This was the radical innovation he had called for that would express unprecedented sensations and demand fresh responses. “We cannot react to Byzantine art as did the Byzantine…,” he wrote. “Art must always be modern”40 Prichard was a model witness, clear, observant and astute. The notes he and his young followers jotted down provide unique snapshots of Matisse in action as three successive models—an eighteen-year-old professional from Montmartre, the young wife of the art critic Maurice Raynal, and the sister of one of Prichard’s disciples-were each in turn subjected to the same reductive formula as the cathedral of Notre Dame.
The nature of perception, which preoccupied Matisse, was one of the key questions currently being addressed by the philosopher Henri Bergson in a wildly popular series of public lectures at the Collège de France. Prichard and his band of followers, all passionate Bergsonians, shuttled between Matisse’s studio and the Sorbonne, laying the philosophers findings before the painter, who recognised a basic system that might take him further even than masters like Delacroix and Corot. Matisse conceded that Delacroix had been wrong about how useful the invention of photography would be to painters: “Its real service was in showing that the artist was concerned with something other than external appearance,” he said, pinpointing what that something was in the two views from his window.41 “He accepted Bergson’s idea that the artist is concerned with the discovery and expression of reality…,” Prichard noted. “He accepted also the position that a picture by Corot was meant to be looked at, while his own painting was meant to be felt and submitted to.”
This was the nub. Matisse’s determination to reach places where photography could not go meant digging down further than he ever had before towards the inner source of life and energy, to currents and stirrings deep within himself, what Bergson called “the vital spark” and Socrates had identified as the daimon. Matisse was irresistibly drawn, like his whole generation in these first years of a new century, to the unconscious. At the same time he was tugged back from it by the artist’s need to control and order, “to give yourself completely to what you’re doing while simultaneously watching yourself do it,” the goal that had struck him in Tangier as almost impossible to achieve for a painter as instinctive as himself.42 Matisse needed Prichard’s clear, sharp, legal mind now more than ever if he was to negotiate a new deal between thought and feeling. In the winter of 1913–14, he set himself to unravel and, with Prichard’s help, articulate the theory behind everything he had known and done by instinct in Morocco.
He could not have found a more indefatigable assistant. Prichard proved invaluable, scrutinising, probing, prodding, asking questions, drawing analogies, playing Socrates to Matisse’s Plato in a series of studio dialogues conducted before an audience of attentive young philosophers. Prichard’s little band, many of them recruited through Bergs on’s lectures, included several Sorbonne students headed by Camille Schuwer and Georges Duthuit, the Oxford aesthete William King, and various more or less free-floating offspring from cultivated, affluent, cosmopolitan families, like the Greek Paul Rodocanachi and the Brazilian Albert Landsberg. The first priority was to clear the ground. On 10 January 1914, King recorded a conversation in which Matisse described how he would train—or retrain—a student disabled by the corrupt practices of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to trust his eyes by copying nature, starting with the studio goldfish:
MSP: The student would say you had to kill the fish first, because they’re moving.
HM: I would stop him immediately because these fish are life itself.
MSP: Then you would admit that there are two modes of expression, one concerned with life and the other only with dead subjects.
HM: I admit it.43
Matisse’s two gleaming orange fish, together with the plant arching towards the window on the stool beside them, animate a beautiful Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (colour fig. 16) painted in muted purples, greys, pinky brown and turquoise in the low light of the New Year. He said he wanted a sense of movement within an overall design, and reckoned that this constantly shifting process involved everything from the fish to the furniture in his painting room. “Take this chair,” said Prichard. “Yes,” said Matisse, “but when I paint it, I see it in relationship to the wall, to the light in the room that encloses it and to the objects that surround it. It would be different if I wanted to buy it: I might perhaps have a first impression of its beauty, but then I’d check to see if it was solidly built, etc.” Even the humble, wooden, upright studio chair—forerunner of more exotic protagonists in a whole series of love affairs Matisse would conduct over the years with chairs—had now become a vital element in the effort to resee and refeel reality. Matisse agreed when Prichard pointed out that his intuitive and reflective vision was the opposite of the shrewd, heartless, bargain-hunting appraisal of the Beaux-Arts student.
Matisse needed an external response more urgently than ever as his experiments grew steadily more extreme. Once Prichard counted eleven other people crammed into the big studio at Issy (“I said to Matisse it was like an afternoon at the Bon Marché”).44 This was 3 November 1913, the day on which the painter unveiled his wife’s newly finished portrait and plunged immediately into a fresh engagement with a total stranger. Mabel Bayard Warren was a friend of Sarah Stein, daughter of an American ambassador to Britain, and widow of the president of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who had been Prichard’s sponsor in the United States. Matisse claimed she was descended from the great French chivalric hero Bayard, too.45 Unfazed by either the African tribal carvings or the equally unsettling effigies produced by Matisse himself, the intrepid Mrs. Warren accepted the painter’s invitation to return on 6 November to sit for her portrait.
Matisse, Portrait of Mrs. Samuel Dennis Warren, 1913: a portrait that astonished the sitter, like a magic trick
According to Prichard, Matisse spent the intervening three days purifying and preparing himself to draw her. Certainly he was in a highly receptive state throughout the session, which left him thrilled and shaken. “I couldn’t do that every day,” he said. “It was like travelling in an aeroplane. I passed two hours of the intensest strain.”46 The resulting drawing was so life-like it resembled not only the sitter but several of her relatives as well. When Mrs. Warren told him he had somehow conjured up her daughter, her father and her aunt, Matisse said it only went to show the vitality of drawing by comparison with photography. To Prichard. who was beginning to speak of Matisse as a spiritualist or seer, it seemed as if he could tap into and transmit deep unconscious tides of feeling (“He was to take hold of the current of Life itself and hand it on to us”).
This episode, which astonished the sitter and her friends like a magic trick, clearly demonstrated Matisse’s ability to grasp and penetrate a subject by means not always easy to explain. “There was a constant movement of her will forwards and backwards, giving and withdrawing, opening and closing,” he told Prichard afterwards, sounding like a fisherman tickling a trout, even waggling his fingers to emphasise the moment when his slippery subject all but got away: “There was no change in the features unless in the light of her eyes, but there was a constant vibration [Matisse moved his hand rapidly], it was like a rippling lake, like sunshine on water, there was nothing whatever to seize and there was no point where it seemed possible for me to begin.”
This was the germ from which his paintings grew. All the most disturbing portraits of this period (including the Portrait of Mme Matisse) secrete within the final version a first, naturalistic image agreed by observers to be strikingly like the sitter. The process that led from one to the other remained mysterious, even to Matisse, who said it came from a level below conscious thought. Here Bergsonian reasoning could not help him. All Prichard’s attempts to elucidate a set of rules met with dogged insistence from Matisse that, in his precarious position, there were none:
MSP: It follows then that a philosophy is necessary.
HM: Yes, certainly, its easier to subscribe to a philosophy, a religion, a family; there’s something comforting about finding yourself supported by an organisation.
MSP: Bergson said there was only one philosophy.
HM: Yes, I can conceive that as a possibility.47
Matisse’s scepticism was partly constitutional, partly a reflection of his (and Prichard’s) dismay over Bergson’s admiration for the most conventional forms of academic art. Matisse felt that, if Bergson’s taste in painting could not be taken seriously, the validity of his philosophical positions was also questionable (the nearest he got to reading him was in Tangier, where he kept one of Bergson’s books with a detective story beside the bed for light reading in the mornings after a sleepless night).48 For all his need for support from other painters in Tangier, and from philosophers in Paris, when it came to firsthand exploration. Matisse was on his own.
His canvases grew darker and more austere as he pushed forward with the programme of progressive elimination begun in his painting of his wife and continued in his next portrait, Grey Nude with Bracelet. “ My model is a young girl of eighteen from Montmartre but very simple and pure,” he told Prichard, explaining that he had got rid of colour because it interfered with the tender plastic quality of his model. “There’s a breath of innocence about her, and I found colour fought against that feeling.”49 He was more stringent still in his painting of the nineteen-year-old Germaine Raynal, perched on a studio stool and reduced to a series of flat rectangles—torso, thighs, long narrow skirt—laid out more or less at right angles to one another in straight lines and leaden greys. Splashes of peacock green and blue on her skirt, a tawny red licking along the stool-strut and filling the tabletop behind her, make little headway against a darkness which Matisse said closed in of its own accord without deliberate intervention on his part (“He would never have dared paint consciously a picture like that of the Girl on the Stool, for he never would have thought it possible to construct a picture based on a simple neutral grey”).50
Matisse, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), 1914
Woman on a High Stool made a funereal impression on Prichard’s friend Bertie Landsberg, who volunteered his nineteen-year-old sister Yvonne as Matisse’s next subject in April.51 The drawing was commissioned by their mother, whose first choice (the more modish William Orpen or Paul Helleu) had been abandoned at her sons insistence in favour of Matisse, largely because of the girls hopelessly unfashionable looks. Yvonne was tall, with quirky features and long limbs. As the younger sister of a beauty of classical regularity, she had had her own ugliness relentlessly dinned into her by her family. Shy, sensitive and desperately unhappy, she drew herself in the mirror as a big, plain, bug-eyed, rather chinless teenager. “It was felt that her defects would be absorbed by the deformations of a modern painter,” Pierre Matisse recalled drily.52
At their first meeting, when her brother brought her to the studio, Matisse said Mlle Landsberg reminded him of a magnolia bud, and not surprisingly she flowered for him after that. His drawings suggest a natural poise, grace and frivolity as well as sharply pronounced individuality. He set her at ease as an experienced photographer might coax a tense subject today, sketching her smoking, lounging, pouting, and turning away from him with hands on hips. Her brother, who chaperoned the sittings, watched Matisse draw her from the waist down, kneeling with her back turned in a long frilly skirt that disclosed the turned-up soles of her elegant French shoes. “I remember at the time marvelling that these frills and soles should, somehow, have the power of evoking—at least, for me, subtly but distinctly, much of my sister’s personality,” he wrote.53 The drawing that was formally submitted for approval in May split the family down the middle, one faction complaining that the nose was far too large, the other (which included the sitter and her two brothers) declaring the nose was not a problem. “Their friends range themselves under one banner or the other,” reported Prichard, “and even the servants are recruited by one side and by the other.”54
Mme Landsberg eventually agreed to let Matisse paint Yvonne’s portrait on the same terms he had once proposed to Greta Moll: he would be free to paint what he pleased while the family’s right to buy implied no obligation. Prichard and his band came to see the portrait launched on 8 June, and continued to attend sittings throughout the month.55 Although nothing could reassure her about her looks, Yvonne clearly liked and trusted Matisse, and so did her brother. The painter himself was expansive and good-humoured in breaks between sessions. He had moved back with his family to Issy for the summer but kept the studio on the quay, which was ideal for this kind of small-scale work, handy for Prichard and the Landsbergs, and surrounded by other painters. Marquet upstairs was a convivial companion, and Matisse had been too long away from Paris. In May he attended the first night of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel’ (noting with interest the influence of his own Harmony in Red on the décor by Natalya Goncharova, who knew the painting from Shchukin’s house in Moscow).56 He bought himself a beautiful and costly violin that month—a luxury that could have been justified only as necessary for work—and played it regularly to calm his nerves after painting sessions.57
He also acquired round about this time a small, second-hand printing press, which he installed in the flat at quai St-Michel, practising his skills in rapid etchings, drypoints and lithographs of friends and family that have the casual immediacy of snapshots. One day he sketched Bertie Landsberg’s head (“He first drew a beautifully elongated oval, but—on looking at one more carefully—pulled it out cubistically, saying that its… real structure… was squarish and its whole character far more vigoureux than at first appeared”).58 He made serial etchings of Yvonne, framing her in a garland of magnolias. A couple of impromptu etchings of Prichard, looking critical and also surrounded by magnolias, did not please the sitter (“I doubt he can make a drawing of me in five minutes,” Prichard grumbled to Georges Duthuit. “I am more complicated than he supposes”).59 Landsberg said that these images rose spontaneously from the depths of Matisse’s imagination, brought to the surface “while playing, as it were, at the point of his pencil, or etchers needle, on shield paper or copper plate.”60
Matisse, Yvonne Landsberg, July 1914
Meanwhile the portrait of Yvonne contracted and expanded on canvas: “At the end of the first sitting the oil portrait too greatly resembled the sitter,” Landsberg recalled long afterwards, “but it became more ‘abstract’ with each sitting, and more—I then thought—’like a Byzantine icon.’ At each sitting it became less physically like, but—possibly—more ‘ spiritually’ like my sister.” The charming, lively, funny girl captured so effortlessly in Matisse’s drawings disappeared behind masklike features with
Matisse, Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg: a picture completed a month before the outbreak of the First World War in which the painter recognised a force greater than himself, “a Socratic demon, the enemy”
black voids for eyes and hornlike protuberances arching from her brow-bone. Her neck became a fluted column, her body a lacy carapace or shell in soft, steely greys and black enlivened by flickers of pink and turquoise against a delicately painted ground of dark, feathery brushstrokes. Prichard left to spend the summer holidays in Germany on 27 June, having watched with approval as the painting grew, in his view, steadily better, more hieratic and inhuman.
After Prichard left, Matisse reversed his brush at the end of the final sitting and scratched great white lines in the wet paint, circling the body and swirling out from it like a bud unfurling or wings clapping open. The slight, grave, pale figure within this vortex of whorls and claw marks conveys a poignant sense of human vulnerability and endurance. Marcel Duchamp, seeing the Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg for the first time two years later, preferred it to the Portrait of Mme Matisse.61 But Yvonnes mother recoiled from the finished painting, and so initially did the artist. “Matisse says himself it’s a bit of an enormity,” Prichard wrote from Germany on 7 July. “His picture shocks even him a little, he feels uneasy and slightly surprised. He seems to me like a sparrow hawk that has hatched an eagle. He feels in himself something greater than himself, a Socratic demon, the enemy.”62 The demon that looked out of Yvonne Landsberg’s blank black eyes on canvas in the summer of 1914 was the same disturbing intuition recognised long afterwards by the American collector Albert Barnes, who said it would be hard to overestimate the significance of the Armory Show: “The war came from the social malaise expressed in the paintings.”63
In Paris in the summer of 1914 an envoy from Gurlitt’s gallery in Berlin called on Matisse, who, with help from Hans Purrmann, persuaded a reluctant Sarah and Michael Stein to lend nineteen paintings—the pick of their Matisse collection—to the German retrospective scheduled for July. The Sembats prudently declined to send anything at that juncture to Berlin. Shchukin, returning home after a holiday on the Italian Riviera, stopped off in Paris that month to finalise arrangements for the last three canvases still missing from the top tier of paintings in his drawing room. He chose Woman on a High Stool, and agreed on subjects for two new works: a picture of boats to be painted in Collioure (where the Matisses planned to spend the rest of the summer), and a self-portrait to go with Matisse’s painting of his wife.64 But none of the three missing works ever reached Moscow. The Portrait of Mme Matisse, which had arrived in the spring, was the last of Matisse’s paintings to enter Shchukin’’s collection.
Paris, like the rest of France, had no premonition of disaster up until Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July. The Russians began to mobilise two days later, the French followed suit, and on 3 August Germany declared war on France. Trains had already been commandeered to transport nearly two million soldiers south and east towards Alsace and the Swiss border, where a short, sharp war was expected to be over well before the winter. Buses stopped running in the capital overnight, and taxis disappeared from streets suddenly full of men heading for the stations. Gun batteries assembled in the Tuileries Gardens, and soldiers with fixed bayonets guarded bridges across the Seine. Theatres closed, food prices rose and huge queues formed outside the banks. “The weirdest thing in Paris, now that all else has been sacrificed,” Jules Flandrin wrote home in the first week of the war, “is the sudden obliteration of anything to do with work, values, any kind of comfort or settled future.”65
The precise sequence of events may have been unexpected, but few seriously questioned that the time had finally come to avenge France’s defeat by Germany in 1871. The mood was calm, resigned, even relieved. Matisse, Marquet and Camoin had themselves photographed on horseback beside an airship tethered on Issy airfield, and posted the picture off to Manguin with a cheerful message on the back: “As you can see, we have just formed a squadron for the defence of France. I imagine you wont hesitate to join us, and we shall be the first to enter Berlin. We impatiently await you—see you soon—Marquet.”66 All four were waiting, like every other Frenchman between the ages of eighteen and forty-eight, to be called up officially by the army. Matisse, finding it for once impossible to work, relieved his feelings through the violin, driving the rest of the family distracted with his playing for up to four or five hours a day. “That was a
The Matisse family at Issy in the summer of 1914 with Berthe and Armand Parayre
time of gloom and confusion,” said his son Pierre, who was also obliged to practice daily. “The whole household was in a state of jangled nerves.”67 Berthe Parayre, staying at Issy that summer, found herself stranded, unable to get back to her college in Ajaccio now that travel had become almost impossible for civilians. Even coming in and out of Issy required a special pass.
After a fortnight or so the family moved back to Paris, where three adults cannot have fitted easily with three adolescents—two of them as tall as men—into a three-room flat. These first weeks of suspense and dislocation were so hard to bear that Amélie appealed to the town hall to find her husband some sort of temporary occupation (“My own work is going nowhere, inspiration being obviously lacking,” he explained to his mother, “and I’ve other things on my mind”).68 Foreigners disappeared almost overnight from Paris. Berthe eventually managed to squeeze into a third-class carriage crammed with homing Italians on a train that inched its way south at the rate of thirty miles in four hours. Newspapers were so heavily censored that it was impossible to be sure what was happening. There were wild rumours of German armies speeding through Belgium, but no real doubt at this stage about France’s ability to send them packing in a month or two at most.
Britain had entered the war the day after France, and the towns and villages of Matisse’s native North turned out to welcome British troops marching through Flanders from the Channel ports. Their headquarters in Le Cateau was a stone’s throw from Henri’s birthplace, and popular confidence was so widespread that on 20 August his mother telegraphed him to send Pierre to her in Bohain. Matisse tactfully replied that both boys were quite happy working at their holiday tasks in the mornings, and fishing in the long hot afternoons from the quay above the Seine. British troops had been streaming though Bohain for a week on their way to Mons in Belgium, but neither Matisse nor his mother was particularly alarmed when word came that the Germans had reached Brussels. “I think that, if they’ve been allowed to get away with it so far for whatever flimsy reasons,” he wrote the day he got her telegram, “they’ll be given a good pasting as soon as things look serious.”
Brussels fell that day to the Germans. Belgium was overrun. The French were decisively defeated in the Battle of Charleroi, which lasted three days, 21—23 August, and left forty thousand Frenchmen dead. The Allied armies fell back on 24 August, retreating rapidly in forced marches through Picardy and Flanders before the unstoppable German advance. Matisse and Guillaume Apollinaire lunched the day after the defeat at Charleroi with André Level, who recalled the occasion nearly half a century later in his memoirs:
What we talked about at that time, and in the days that followed when our whole future as a people lay in the balance, one can well imagine, and one can still remember. A communiqué located our front on the River Oise. What haste in our precipitate withdrawal! The government fled the endangered capital. It seemed for a while as if she would have no defence, planned or otherwise, and wretched were those who believed in despair that she would be taken. I was one of them.69
The Oise flows close by Bohain. The first bewildered English stragglers reached the town on 24 August, followed by a mass of beaten and exhausted soldiers who passed through, leaving the inhabitants to the mercy of their pursuers. The Belgian refugees who had trudged ahead of them, telling tall stories of an invading army on their heels, turned out to be right after all. Madame Matisse, like all those old enough to remember the last German occupation, buried her valuables in the back garden. Le Cateau fell after fierce fighting two days later, and the wounded were treated in an improvised hospital set up in Matisse’s old school, the Lycée Henri Martin at St-Quentin. On 27 August, the people of Bohain prepared to receive the German army in silence, with closed shutters and empty streets, as they had done on 1 January 1871, the day after Matisse’s
Louis Joseph Guillaume, photo of occupying Germai troops marching past the Matisse seed-store in Bohain
first birthday. He had nothing to go on at this point but rumours, and the stories of terror and humiliation he had heard endlessly as a child growing up in the aftermath of the Prussian war.
A squadron of British lancers on horseback charged a detachment of Prussian dragoons a few miles outside St-Quentin on 28 August 1914, but by nightfall the Germans had taken the town by force. This second battle of St-Quentin was a more savage replay of the first, four decades earlier. Once again the invaders paused just long enough to pillage the area, raiding cellars, slaughtering poultry, pigs and cattle, loading stolen carts and wagons with loot (“It’s an army delirious and drunk with victory and wine,” wrote one of Matisse’s compatriots),70 before pushing on deeper into France. Communication with the population in occupied territory abruptly ceased. The first definite confirmation Matisse had of his family’s situation was a curt communiqué informing the stunned and incredulous French nation on 29 August that from the river Somme to the Vosges mountains their country was now in German hands.
Distant cannon fire could already be heard in Paris. No one had envisaged a need to defend the capital, but makeshift barricades of earth, railway sleepers and barbed wire were now flung up to block the gates. On 1 September, the army officially requisitioned the Matisses’ property as a military headquarters, strategically placed on the bluff above Issy. near the fort and the airfield (where Matisse’s distant cousin, Raymond Saulnier, would shortly design and build the first French fighter planes in the Morane-Saulnier workshops).71 By 2 September the Germans were in Senlis, less than thirty miles from Notre Dame. Half a million Parisians followed the government when it fled south that night to Bordeaux. There was pandemonium on the roads and at the railway stations. Jean Puy said that if he hadn’t had his wife with him, he would have fled by bicycle or on foot.72 The Matisses had already sent the children to their grandfather and great-aunt in Toulouse, and done what they could—rolling and stowing canvases, burying sculpture in the garden—to clear the house, but, with no transport and almost no notice, serious preparation was impossible. Anything might happen now that there was a wholly unexpected enemy at the gates. “I remember our state of turmoil as the Germans advanced on Paris…,” Matisse wrote to his wife four years later, when the capital faced invasion for the second time; “that was no joke, do you remember?”73
In the first frantic week of September 1914, Parisians scrambled onto any train they could, no matter what its destination. The Matisses and Marquet managed to get to Nantes in Brittany, making their way south via Bordeaux to Toulouse. They finally reached Collioure on 10 September, the day after the Germans received their first defeat, just short of Paris, in the Battle of the Marne. The capital had been saved by what many thought of as a miracle. The invaders fled with the Allies in pursuit, but French hopes of beating them back behind their own frontier faltered after a few days when the Germans halted and refused to budge beyond the Aisne River. The two armies now turned northwards to the sea, fighting their way across the devastated plains of Picardy and Flanders all through the autumn, digging themselves in along the Somme, facing one another on either side of a line enclosing the regions where Matisse had grown up and gone to school. Having crossed France to fetch up in its furthest southwest corner, he could hardly have been worse placed to hear anything of his mother or his brother, who was stranded with a wife and two small daughters behind German lines in the northeast.
Anxiety would soon drive him back to Paris, but for the moment the family settled back into their old rented house at the top of the avenue de la Gare, and found a tutor to give lessons to the boys (whose school at Noyon, now on the front line, was one of the first casualties of the war). The tutor had a couple of Parisian lodgers who turned out to be Picasso’s young friends, Juan and Josette Gris, overtaken in Collioure by the war with nothing to live on and no prospect of money coming in. Their income had dried up with the departure from France of the Cubists’ dealer, the German Daniel Kahnweiler, who had supported Gris with small but regular monthly payments. Matisse and his wife remembered well enough how it had felt to face destitution without warning at almost exactly the same age. He and Marquet went with Gris to Céret to consult another of Picasso’s friends, the sculptor Manuel Manolo, who offered to find the couple a place to live while Matisse contacted alternative sponsors in Paris. By far the most impressive of the Cubists following Braque and Picasso, Gris was more rigorously analytical than either of the others. His ability to transmit feeling through the strict logic of his grid systems suited Matisse, who took up again with him the technical discussions he had begun the year before with Picasso. A solid friendship sprang from this month at Collioure, when the two talked painting so relentlessly that Gris said the unspeculative Marquet could hardly bear to listen to them.74
The only work Matisse produced that month was a strange, strippeddown painting that he never exhibited in his lifetime, and which would have been almost impossible to decipher if he had. Its subject was an open window, a motif he had first sketched as a boy bored out of his mind in his first job, copying documents as a provincial lawyer’s clerk. Life opened up for him as soon as he became a painter, but he returned to the same theme at intervals whenever he felt blocked or threatened, most notably in Studio under the Eaves, painted in 1903 at the height of the Humbert scandal, a canvas almost entirely given over to deep shadow except for a small central window opening onto brilliant sunlight beyond. Now he reversed the formula. He painted a pair of faded, sun-bleached, wooden shutters at each side of an open French window, reducing them to vertical bands of soft blue, grey and turquoise framing a black void. The effect is majestic, bleak and sombre, but at the same time suffused with
Matisse, French Window at Collioure, 1914: a window opening onto war in what Louis Aragon called the most mysterious picture Matisse ever painted
light. The poet Louis Aragon said in retrospect that French Window at Collioure was the most mysterious picture Matisse ever painted:
When we note its date, 1914, and it must have been in summer, this mystery makes me shiver. Whether or not the painter intended it, and whatever that French window once opened onto, it remains open. It was onto the war then, and it’s still onto events to come that will plunge the lives of unknown men and women into darkness, the black future, the inhabited silence of the future.75
When this canvas was finally shown in 1966, more than fifty years after it was painted, it made perfect sense to eyes trained on American abstraction.
Matisse left Collioure reluctantly to travel back alone to Paris on 22 October, breaking his journey in Bordeaux to talk to Marcel Sembat, who had been roped in as Minister of Public Works to represent the Left in a hastily reconstituted cabinet in the first month of the war. Sembat confirmed Matisse’s suspicions about the optimism reflected in the government-censored press. They discussed German brutality towards civilians in the occupied zone, and the fact that the government had no plans as yet for returning to the capital. “There have been things we dont read about in the newspapers,” Matisse reported ominously to his wife. “They reckon here that the war will last a long time.”76 Business required his return to Paris, but his letters were largely given over to such meagre news as could be guessed or gleaned about the fate of friends. On 25 October, Gertrude Stein filled him in on a batch of artists (“Basler and Nadelman have left for America—there is no news of La Fresnaye—Segonzac is wounded… Derain has left for the front”). The next day there was more gossip from Jean Puy (“They say Picasso came back to Paris before the war and drew 100,000 francs in silver out of the bank… that Vlaminck is a Belgian military painter—that Uhde and Levy were spies and have been shot in a concentration camp”). Shells had fallen on the Left Bank all around the quai St-Michel. When Matisse went to inspect the house at Issy (still intact, although somewhat dilapidated after occupation by French staff officers, who were on the point of moving out), the neighbours told him of sons wounded, killed or taken prisoner.
Unable to get word of his mother, tormented by nightmares and crushed by the atmosphere of foreboding in Paris, Matisse longed to be back in Collioure, where it was still possible to attend to matters other than the daily news bulletin. “I saw the prospect of enough work there to last me the whole winter. I’d already begun the open balcony, and I wanted to go on with it. and I had other things in mind, for I was beginning to get into my stride at last,” he wrote, adding wistfully, “and it’s so far from the war.”77 But his hopes of making a quick getaway were dashed by his failure to drum up funds, either on his own account or for Juan Gris. He persuaded Gertrude Stein to make Gris a modest monthly allowance, topped up by further contributions from the sculptor and art dealer Joseph Brummer, one of Matisse’s former pupils, now serving as a Red Cross stretcher bearer. Gris was to repay them with canvases, but, at some point after he and Josette joined Matisse in Paris at the end of October. Gertrude apparently went back on the agreement. “To my stupefaction, I learned later from Gris that she had done nothing about it,” said Matisse, who never spoke to her again.78 Relations between the two had cooled as it became increasingly clear that Gertrude no longer understood Matisse’s painting, and tended to write him off in consequence. Her inability to influence him, and his dislike of her mischief-making, made him seem to her stuffy and censorious. Keeping on equally good terms with Gertrude and her sister-in-law was in any case notoriously tricky, and Matisse made no secret of how much more highly he rated Sarah.
His attempts to consolidate his own financial position were even more unsuccessful. Plans to extract a substantial sum by putting pressure on Félix Fénéon at Bernheim-Jeune came to nothing.79 On 27 October, Fénéon courteously explained that there was absolutely no prospect of advancing anything whatsoever, given the rocky state of the market, and the uncertain outcome of the German thrust northwards to the coast. Matisse was paying for the mutual distrust between himself and his dealers that went back to their attempted double cross over Dance and Music. The scheme he had cooked up with Shchukin—to bypass Bernheim-Jeune by producing canvases too big to fall within the terms of their contract—meant that the bulk of his work over the past two years had gone direct to Moscow with no question of the dealers taking a percentage. Matisse immediately telegraphed Shchukin, who replied on 2 November that the Moscow stock exchange had closed and money could no longer be transferred to France.80 “This could go on for a long time,” Matisse wrote grimly. His twin sources of income had dried up simultaneously, leaving him with a family to support, little in the way of savings and no apparent buyers for his pictures, even supposing he could bring himself to paint again.
One of the reasons for Matisse’s return from Collioure was an urgent appeal from Walter Pach, who turned up from New York on 16 October to find soldiers occupying the house at Issy and no one in the Steins’ studio on the rue Madame. Pach had come to organise a Matisse exhibition for the Montross Gallery in Manhattan as part of a personal campaign to consolidate and extend the ground gained for modern art by the Armory Show. His French friends were astounded and impressed by his refusal to let his plans be deflected by world war. He told Matisse that this was the only stand he could make, as an American, against German barbarity: “I consider the fact that these brutes have set the physical world on fire doesn’t mean that all reasonable activity must cease.”81 Pach”s stubborn insistence on business as usual was a comfort in the circumstances. The American ambassador lent support. So, after an initial flurry of bewilderment, did Sarah and Michael Stein, responding warmly from the Mediterranean holiday villa where they had settled down to see out the war (“Don’t fail to impress on him that he must now look to America for a market for his art for some time to come,” wrote Michael, urging Pach to contact the painter directly. “Now is the time to have the Americans begin to own Matisse”).82
The show was to be a retrospective, offering work for sale from the Studio Under the Eaves of 1903 to the latest Portrait of Mile Yvonne Landsberg, with a catalogue more comprehensive than anything that had yet appeared, except in Russia. Matisse chose and supplied the pictures, co-opting Fénéon at Bernheim-Jeune to organise shipping and insurance. Pach’s plan to consult Fry in London had to be dropped at the last minute because the Channel ferry had been requisitioned for a British military convoy. But the Americans doggedness and his touching faith in a transatlantic future were heartening at a time when the rest of the world seemed on the point of disintegration. Pach, who spent much time in the studio on the quai St-Michel, was perplexed by Matisse’s inability to paint: the most he seemed able to concentrate on was his series of casual, snapshot-style portraits of friends and acquaintances, drawn at top speed directly onto the lithography stone. One day. just as Pach was leaving for his next pressing appointment, Matisse put him in a fever of impatience by making him wait five minutes to have his picture taken (“It’s the soul of Walter Pach as seen by angels,” said the museum director Bryson Burroughs, when this etching reached New York).83
He made seven etchings of Josette Gris, who with Juan was the only other person Matisse saw regularly in these uneasy weeks when the promised liberation of France seemed against all expectation to be receding. He ate with the couple most nights, on condition they let him contribute towards costs and pay model fees for the portrait sittings. “After all, it’s wartime,” he told his wife (Gris would find an alternative means of support a few months later from the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who took on many of Kahnweiler’s clients at this point). Like Pach, they provided company and some semblance of normal life. He could still discuss Cubist practice with Gris, and with Marcel Duchamp’s brother, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, whom Pach took him to meet towards the end of October. “It’s a projectile,” Matisse said, admiring the streamlined elegance and massive compact force of Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse in his studio at Puteaux.84 But talking and thinking about art gave only limited respite from more urgent anxieties. The eldest of the three Duchamp brothers was already at the front, and Raymond himself had been drafted into the medical corps to tend military casualties at the local hospital of St-Germain. “He said we weren’t in the firing line at Issy,” wrote Matisse, whose letters to his wife reflect the almost universal sense of numbness and shock. “Paris is dismal when you’re away… give my best to Marquet, who’s in luck if he can go on working in the midst of so much suffering.”85
This was written on 11 November, the day the last convulsive struggle of the year in Flanders reached its height at Ypres, which was savagely attacked and ferociously defended, before the two opposing sides settled down to shell one another for the next four years across ramparts and trenches running for 350 miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea. Official sources still insisted that the war would soon be won, but, in the absence of hard news, premonitions of carnage on an unimaginable scale were beginning to filter through to ordinary people. Numbers could be guessed at from the trainloads of wounded soldiers filling civilian hospitals. Georgette Sembat, who had visited the front, brought dreadful stories from the shattered towns behind the lines. Sembat himself told Matisse that the combined losses, in soldiers killed, maimed or captured on both sides, came to well over three million in the first three months of war.86 Twenty-five thousand Frenchmen killed in the Battle of the Marne would escalate to twelve times as many by the end of 1914.
Charles Camoin, posted that autumn to the southern tip of the western front, sent word of crops destroyed, abandoned villages looted and fired, barbed-wire fortifications protected by fields sown with mines. Civilians who had failed to flee in time survived as best they could under German martial law. In Bohain, as elsewhere, anyone infringing regulations could be shot on sight. Any house suspected of harbouring resistance was burned down. The invaders confiscated everything from firearms, axes, saws and spades to livestock, fuel and means of transport. Banks closed, shops emptied and supplies dried up. As winter set in, the inhabitants of occupied towns and villages had nothing but their dwindling stores and the produce of their gardens. Matisse’s brother had been rounded up at the end of September with almost four hundred other able-bodied men from Bohain, and deported to a prison camp at Havelberg in east Germany. Their seventy-year-old mother remained in her house alone in failing health with one elderly female servant and a daughter-in-law across the street. “I have no news of my relations, or my brother,” Matisse reported in December to Camoin.87
All their friends (except for Marquet, who was too frail, and the Spaniards, like Gris and Picasso, who were exempt) were either at the front or waiting to be posted. By the time Matisse finally received call-up papers summoning him to a medical examination, he was running a raging temperature with flu and so obviously unfit for active service that the board rejected him, relegating his name to the auxiliary reserve. He made a good story afterwards out of the doctor, who let him off because he felt bad about having passed the man ahead of Matisse in the queue, in spite of protests that he had throat cancer (“You’ll do to make a corpse,” the doctor said prosaically).88 But at the time the rejection provoked mixed feelings. Matisse had made his dispositions, prepared himself to leave his family, even bought his army boots. He tried twice to get the verdict reversed, and was turned down both times on grounds of age (at forty-four he was four years short of the conscripts’ upper age limit) and a weak heart. All he could do was send regular letters to friends at the front, run errands for them and keep an eye on their affairs at home. Quantities of postal packets went out that winter from the Matisses in Collioure and Paris. Matthew Prichard, interned from the first week of August 1914 in a camp for English nationals at Spandau, near Berlin, received food parcels, warm clothes and (which mattered more to him than either) prints and picture postcards. Camoin got chocolate, sweets, shoes, gloves, powdered milk, a bicycle and the first volume of Les Liaisons dangereuses.
Paris, with half its population gone, felt like a ghost town. Matisse said only two things could make him want to stay. One was the need to remain as near as possible to his mother, “for when Bohain is liberated, so as to be able to get there.”89 The other was the prospect of trying to earn a living outside the capital: “The terror of working as a copying clerk in an office in Perpignan,” he said, picturing himself starting out again on the alternative career he had narrowly escaped by running away from home to be a painter. But Amélie and the children, already bored and restive in Collioure, rebelled at the possibility of having to move to Perpignan. Henri was clearly relieved when his wife preempted his return south by deciding to pack her bags, close up the Collioure house and bring the family back to Paris in November. “I’m longing to see you all,” he wrote, arranging reduced fares through one of Sembat’s ministerial colleagues, and reminding her to economise: “Things will be better for me when you’re here—though I guess I’ll still be sorry to give up my winter.”90
He bought wood for the stove at Issy, and replaced items missing from the house with hired furniture, beds and blankets. He planned to feed the boys (who were to come on ahead) by taking them to a restaurant at mid-day, and improvising an evening meal himself. Parisian friends thought the family mad to leave Collioure, but none of them could bear to be away at this stage. The boys resumed their education at the Lycée Montaigne (where Pierre shared a bench with a boy he would hear more of later, Yves Tanguy). Marguerite laid tentative plans to be a painter. Their father went back to the relentless practising that drove him to the brink of exhaustion. “Where did you put the violins?” he asked anxiously when one of the Collioure trunks went missing.
He arranged lessons for himself and Pierre from the Belgian violinist Armand Parent, in exchange for drawings. Music provided the outlet Matisse could no longer find in painting, as the weeks that were to have decided the fate of France stretched out into months with no end in sight. “I’d rather be doing something useful for the defence of the country,” wrote Jean Puy, also trying unsuccessfully to work and longing to be mobilised, “but I dont even know how to knit socks.”91 Matisse dashed off a whole series of portrait etchings of young string players, including the Argentinian cellist Olivares, the Spanish violinist Massia, and Eva Mudocci, whose passionate violin playing spoke directly to Parisians in this first winter of the war. He made a last attempt to join the army, appealing for help with Marquet to Marcel Sembat, who wrote back that the best either of them could do for France was to stay at home and paint. “So Marquet and I have ended up going back to work…,” he wrote to Camoin at the end of 1914. “What else can we do, we cant sit all day just waiting for communiqués.”92
The last thing Matisse had worked on in July was a sequence of small head-and-shoulders portraits of Marguerite, who looked debonair and summery in a striped jacket, a straw boater trimmed with roses, a chic little saucer-shaped leather hat. Now the two resumed sittings with a fresh canvas that quickly abandoned all pretence of naturalism (“This picture wants to take me somewhere else,” Matisse told his daughter. “Do you feel up to it?”).93 The sitter’s touching human presence was barred out or blocked off behind a striped grid, spreading out from her own jacket to invade a canvas that, alone among Matisse’s work, looks as if it had been constructed as Gris plotted his paintings, with set-square and ruler. Harsh, impersonal and heavily overpainted, Head, White and Rose is testimony to everything that simultaneously attracted and repelled Matisse in the work of Picasso, Gris and Duchamp-Villon. “What he feared in the new group,” Pach reported, “was the submerging of every sensuous quality in the rising tide of intellectualism.”94
He solved the problem in his next painting, intended as one of the two canvases he had promised Shchukin at their last meeting six months earlier. “It’s my picture of goldfish which I’m re-doing with a figure in it, holding a palette in his hand and observing,” he explained to Camoin, sketching himself seated beside the still-life table with goldfish bowl and potted plant at his window high above the quai St-Michel.95 This time he transposed the domestic scale of his earlier goldfish paintings into a register altogether deeper, darker and more powerful. He reconstituted the studio on canvas in flat black, blue and whitish strips, folding into and out of one another like stage flats, as Alfred Barr observed, and aerated by lively shreds and patches of soft grassy green, violet and apricot pink, yellow and warm orange. In the end the human figure vanished altogether, abstracting itself, leaving nothing but a thumbprint on the vestigial blank palette at the right. Goldfish and Palette (colour fig. 17) is a Cubist work impregnated with a mysterious, unmistakably Matissean intensity of feeling. “I’ve examined this picture twenty times,” André Breton wrote, hailing it almost a decade later as one of the three or four most important works produced by the modern movement. “In truth it possesses at once unheard-of freedom, intelligence, discrimination and audacity. Formal innovation, profound penetration of every object by the artist’s own life, magical colours, it has everything.… I’m convinced Matisse has never put so much of himself into any other painting.”96
Matisse’s chosen role—the observer with a palette in his hand—had been forced on him against his will, at a moment when for the first time he had no heart to play it. In January 1915, he obtained an official permit as a war artist to visit the ruined quarter of Senlis, which had been shelled, sacked and burned by the retreating Germans. But excursions like this seemed futile, if not frivolous, when set beside Camoin’s accounts of journeys to another world—”The country of the trenches, a nameless land, filled with mud and snow”97—where other painters crouched in excrement and foul water, cold, hungry, thirsty, plagued by lice and rats, dodging shellfire and bullets. A steady stream of them passed through Issy on their way to and from the front. The house became a haven for soldiers on leave, from Prichard’s philosophical young friend Georges Duthuit to old comrades like André Derain, who came in the spring to confide his work, and his wife, to the Matisses’ care. Vlaminck, Braque, Flandrin and the only other artists on the route de Clamart—one of Moreau’s former pupils, Jean Chaurand-Nairac, and the local house agent, a Sunday painter named Georges Burgun—had all left to join their regiments by this time. Even Puy passed his medical board, departing at short notice in January with joyful whoops (“When I come back from the war, I’ll bring you a necklace of Boches’ heads to decorate your studio”).98
“Can this last much longer?” Camoin wrote wearily in April. When a letter arrived via the Red Cross that spring from Auguste Matisse, describing the Germans’ treatment of their half-starved French prisoners, Henri went into action. He set aside eleven etchings, pulling fifteen plates from each, to raise funds for a relief scheme organised through the Société des Prisonniers de Guerre. By early May he was posting a weekly parcel of eight kilos of bread or biscuit to his contemporaries from Bohain. He organised publicity, contacted critics, drew up lists and canvassed potential subscribers in Paris and the United States with an energy he could never muster on his own behalf. Mabel Warren offered to sell drawings for the scheme in Boston.99 The great French couturier Jacques Doucet (who had caused a sensation shortly before the war by switching his holdings as a collector from old to modern masters) acquired his first Matisses under it. “I thank you,” wrote the painter, formally acknowledging a promise of 1,500 francs from Doucet, “in the name of my unhappy compatriots, who are deprived of everything, dying of hunger, regularly beaten (as my brother, who is one of them, writes to me), and without news of their loved ones left behind in occupied territory.”100
Like everyone else, Matisse scoured the official bulletins and begged friends at the front for information (“Père Matisse,” Puy wrote unhappily, when he found himself posted away from the Flanders front, “forgive me for not being able to give you the news you want of your relations”).101 Matisse feared especially for Puy, whose health and strength were wretchedly unequal to the forced marches, alternating with “violent drenchings from machine guns, shells, torpedoes and other dirty tricks,” described in his resolutely cheerful letters.102 “Are we really going to have a winter campaign?” Matisse asked in disbelief as the stalemate in Flanders dragged on towards a second year, adding in a fierce, uncharacteristic outburst to Camoin, “What has happened to my mother, to whom the doctors gave one or two years to live three years ago, when she had a heart attack? You can see, mon vieux, that this war is terrible for everyone.”103
As the war shifted eastwards to Russia and the Turkish campaign in 1915, people slowly began to realise that the generals’ unbudgeable determination to rid France of invaders could only bring disaster (attempts to breach the German trenches at Arras, thirty miles from Bohain, ended in failure, with French losses of 134.000 in May, 96,000 in September, and another 143,000 that autumn in Champagne, where Puy was in the front line). The western front had become a human abattoir. Matisse told Camoin, on leave that summer, that the war made a mockery of civilisation, but his own enforced exclusion from it left him with a heavy sense of impotence and unreality.104 Reports of his New York show at the beginning of the year might as well have been news from another planet. Matisse sent an engraving with friendly messages to Pach (who had persuaded John Quinn—about to become one of America’s prime modernist collectors—to buy two canvases, and sold the Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg to a close friend, the writer Walter Arensberg). Work continued intermittently, in the studio and on a brief escape from Paris to Arcachon in the southwest, but Matisse felt himself out of place, in the wrong job, in some ways as frustrated as his friends at the front (“That bitch Painting has given me so much trouble over the past ten years,” Puy wrote philosophically, “that I can easily divorce her for the next few months”).105 Puy fell silent for three weeks in the autumn after the release of poison gas over his section of the trenches. Camoin, who was transferred to a camouflage unit at the end of the year, described narrow shaves of his own, working at night to erect huge painted screens in the killing fields lit by flares before the German guns.
Matisse sent sympathy, news and urgent instructions to take care. Enforced inactivity made him look back to his past, contemplating the life he might have led as a lawyer’s clerk if he had followed his father’s wishes (or as a violinist if he had chosen music instead of painting). In the summer of 1915 he came across the small canvas on which he had painted his student copy of Davidsz de Heem’s Desserte in 1891. Now he copied his original copy on a second canvas twice as big as the first. “I’m adding to this copy everything I’ve seen since,” he wrote to the critic René Jean, and described his difficulties with the new Desserte to Camoin (who had seen the canvas roughed out on his leave in August): “Still it’s making a little progress. I know better what I know.”106 He told Jean that he had set himself to counter his sense of helplessness, the horror and revulsion that was beginning to modify civilian approval of the war, by turning once again to Heem’s majestic affirmation of peace and plenty.
This minor Flemish masterpiece had served Matisse as a turning point or testing ground twice before. His first, faithful and highly accomplished copy had dispelled his fears of being unable to paint like other students. A few years later he had returned to the same subject for a full-scale attempt to come to terms with Impressionism in his own Desserte. Now he dissected and reorganised the sensuous richness of Heem’s canvas—the great fruit platter spilling cherries and grape clusters, the elaborate glass goblet, the embossed bronze chalice with its bird-lid. the crenellated pie, the napery and glassware—in a composition that combines brilliant clear colour with Cubist structural severity. Based on a simple geometrical black grid, and anchored at the centre by a pair of small, round, red-skinned onions, this second Still Life after de Heem’s “La Desserte” exudes vigour and a sharp, springlike radiance emanating from the central patch of pale, yellowy greens and the harsher turquoise greens in the jagged folds and falls of the white cloth. The canvas confronted a crisis in the perennial clash between passion and discipline from which Matisse told Camoin he rarely emerged victorious: “You have to cross that barrier to reach the light, coloured, soft and pure, the noblest of pleasures.”107
Camoin replied at once to say that this long letter had distanced him as nothing else could from the demoralising misery of trench life, and to
Matisse, Still Life after Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “La Desserte,” 1915: a painting into which Matisse said he put everything he had seen since he first copied this still life as a student nearly a quarter of a century before
reassure Matisse (“In the end its your instinct that gets the upper hand”).108 The picture certainly seems to have dislodged the blockage that had obstructed its creator since August 1914. It took him two or three months to complete, and left him exhausted. He fell ill for two weeks with bronchitis, writing to Pach as soon as he was well enough on 20 November to repeat in more general terms the position he had outlined to Camoin, that the secret of painting was to reconcile theory and practice, thought and instinct, to appease the exacting, analytical side of oneself in order to gain free access to the depths and power of feeling. “At least, that is how it works for me,” he assured Pach, who had asked for criticism of two of his own recent works, “—and we are not after all so different from one another that the same discipline… cant achieve results.”109 Matisse was full of unreserved encouragement for his former pupil and cautious confidence on his own behalf. “I’m leaving tomorrow for Marseilles, where I’m going to spend a fortnight so as to recover completely from my bronchitis. I am taking only my violin. I shall resume painting on my return.”
