Matisse, Study for “The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel” c. 1915—16
Souvenirs of Tangier invaded Matisse’s canvases when he took up painting again at Issy in December 1915, after his fortnight in the south. He set about two inordinately ambitious works, both based on ideas he had mentioned to his wife in letters from Morocco. One was a café scene based on a group of Arabs lounging beneath a striped umbrella on the terrace of the coffeehouse inside the Casbah gate, and the other was a group of women bathing. “The problem is to dominate reality” he said to the Italian Futurist Gino Severini who watched him working on these new Moroccan canvases, “and, by extracting its substance, to reveal it to itself.”1
Matisse, initial sketch for The Moroccans in a letter to his wife from Tangier, 25 October 1912
For the greater part of 1915, reality had dominated him. Now he reversed the position, slashing and wrenching at shape and meaning on his canvases with a controlled ferocity more relentless than even he had shown before. No theory had yet been formulated for this sort of practice, and Matisse had to improvise terms as he went along to explain to Severini what he was doing. “He said with reason that everything that did not contribute to the balance and rhythm of the work, being of no use and therefore harmful, had to be eliminated. That was his way of working: constantly stripping the work down, as you would prune a tree.” In The Moroccans and Bathers by a River, reality has been so thoroughly mastered that parts of it, especially in the first painting, remain almost indecipherable. The watermelons in the bottom left-hand corner of Moroccans (colour fig. 18) look to most observers more like robed Arab figures than the geometric vestiges standing in for café customers at top right. The human beings have dematerialised, the umbrellas stripes have been transferred to a bunch of stylised flowers, and the medina’s turreted ramparts have been rearranged in a design of flat blocks and discs. The effect of light itself has gone into reverse, the clear Tangerine sunshine being replaced by the uniform black ground with which Matisse warms and intensifies his colours. “He compelled the picture to take on a new form, a structure of analogy and interplay for which there was essentially no precedent,” wrote Lawrence Gowing, analysing the reckless, ruthless process that reached its height in Matisse’s work in 1916–17.2
Severini one of a group of Cubist-oriented young painters who congregated often in the studio at Issy in 1916, left a record (unlike his friend Gris) of what Matisse did and said. The older artist brought out his original Moroccan canvases from two years before, explaining his intentions—”You rarely hear a painters reasons and reactions so clearly put”3—and consulting his visitors about the work in progress. He said he reckoned that his years of experiment had clarified his thinking, and taught him “to manipulate without danger the explosives that are colours” (it was Derain who said the paintbrushes in their hands in the Fauve summer of 1905 felt like sticks of dynamite). What currently preoccupied Matisse was construction. For Severini, these strange, synthetic versions of a North African setting at the furthest possible remove from wartime France constituted “an architecture of the will”: an art that would be stable, inscrutable, set apart from and uncontaminated by the squalor and mortality of everyday reality. The Frenchman seemed to have found a way to defy the limitations of the human senses. “Utilising sensations in this way as constituent parts of the work, rather than its sole purpose or point of departure, Matisse rediscovered by means of Cubist theory the liberated architectural approach of the Byzantines.… And his colour became ever more spiritual and abstract, almost independent of the real objects on which it lay.”
There was a heavy price to pay for so extreme an act of will. Matisse had begun Moroccans in November with bronchitis, struggling on with it all through January, when the entire family except Marguerite came down with flu. He was already beginning to despair of his picture by the middle of the month (“I’m not in the trenches,” he wrote ruefully to Camoin, “but I’m in a bad way all the same”).4 A continual monotonous music plagued him from an abscess in his ear.5 The canvas on which he had laid out his design turned out to need widening by two feet.6 Grumbling that the good side of painting only ever materialised in dreams, he itemised for Derain the professional vexations that overlay worse torments in February 1916: “The lack of news from my family, and the anguish that comes from the continual suspense we live in—the little we know, everything they hide from us—all this will give you an idea of how it feels to be a civilian in wartime.”7
Long afterwards Matisse recalled a memory from these years at Issy of lying in bed beside his wife in the early mornings, dreamily tracing the great airy patterns made by the interlocking branches of two tall lime trees planted at either side of the back garden gate.8 He marvelled at the rhythmic balance of form and line that filled his window, and never forgave the gardener who insisted on pollarding the lime trees, chopping off both their heads and leaving them so brutally mutilated that even after they grew back with renewed grace and vigour, Matisse could no longer bear to look at them. But when it came to painting and its needs, he had no such compunction. He chopped and lopped with implacable energy at his own life, and at the lives of those closest to him.
Every place the family ever lived in—cramped Paris flats, disused convents, borrowed houses in Bohain and Lesquielles, seaside lodgings in St-Tropez, Collioure and Cavalière—became primarily a studio. At Issy Matisse regularly produced major works in the garden, the living room and upstairs in his bedroom (his wife’s dressing table with its hatpin stand and ring saucer was the subject of a majestic dual response to Cézanne and Cubism, The Blue Window). The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Rules were enforced. Life at Issy became a variation, transposed into a different key, on the strict, work-centred, patriarchal household in which Matisse had himself grown up. “Above all, discipline your children—don’t just be a comrade to them—you must remain their father,” he would advise his younger son years later, passing on precepts inherited from his own father. “Its hard, but it’s your duty.”9
Matisse’s canvases represented stability, continuity and cohesion for the whole family. Through all the shocks and upheavals, the assaults of scandal and public hostility that reverberated in the background of his children’s early years, the work remained a bulwark. For the painter himself, the family was always his first, crucial audience. In the war years, his wife and children provided the main, sometimes the only, response he got to each fresh breakthrough in his work. He set immense store by their opinions, and all of them took their critical role with corresponding seriousness. “I know the place your paintings occupy in our family,” Pierre wrote in 1927, describing his first major success as a young picture dealer in New York in an impassioned letter to his father (who had just confided the first public showing of Moroccans to him). “Each one represents a period, a new enrichment of our common world, each has taken a place in our daily lives whose importance you only realise when it goes.”10 Pierre was fifteen years old at the beginning of 1916. The works his father was producing in these years would shape and drive his life. He said he had his first conscious inkling of the power a painting could exert from the family’s reaction to a proposal to raise money by selling off their prize possession:
I shall always remember the lunch at Clamart, during the war, when for the first time I realised the importance Cézanne’s Bathers had taken on in what was then the small circle of my life—the unanimous and spontaneous opposition to the idea of packing it off to Bernheim-Jeune! Do you remember? Of course that attachment was partly habit, but it was also the loss of something that belonged to the fabric of the family, as well as the separate inner life that picture led for each of us, to speak only of us children who knew nothing of the sacrifices it represented for the two of you, and what an act of faith it embodied on the part of Maman, for whom it remained silent for so long.
This was the small canvas for which Amélie had pawned the emerald ring given her as a dowry by Madame Humbert. The painting meant nothing to her in those days, but she believed absolutely in her husband—as he believed in Cézanne—at a time when most people wrote both painters off as mad. The couple had hung on to their Bathers through all the hardships that followed, and now it was their children who insisted on finding some other method of retrenchment. In the first winter of the war the Matisses sold their Gauguin (bought from Vollard at the same time as the Cézanne) for 3,000 francs through Walter Pach in New York.11 A year or so later the rented house in Collioure was given up for good and the boys left school. Marguerite’s constant health problems meant that she had had virtually no education until the age of seventeen, except for what she could pick up at home and intermittent lessons at Issy from a governess she disliked. She had pinned high hopes on her aunt Berthe and the training college in Ajaccio, planning to make up for lost time, pass her Baccalauréat and fulfill a childhood ambition to be a doctor. At her aunt’s suggestion, and in spite of her fathers misgivings, she found a place to study for her examinations at a local convent sixth form, but her first experience of normal schooling in the company of her contemporaries came as a shock.
She had little in common with the other girls, the nuns seemed bossy and unsympathetic, and even with Berthe’s steady encouragement, mastering maths, physics, chemistry and Latin all at once from scratch threatened to defeat her (“Take it slowly,” Matisse advised gently. “Calm and confidence. Don’t wear yourself out”).12 Her letters home reported constant fatigue, migraine, lack of appetite and loss of concentration. Her father, recognising many of the problems he had faced himself at her age, sent consolation and reassurance. “Your character, like mine, tends to despair when things go badly, but forgets to take the credit for what goes well,” he wrote, congratulating her on a French essay that had been enthusiastically passed round the Steins. Looking back to the black pit of his own adolescence, he urged her not to panic (“But I’m not afraid of that for you—you are courageous”). Marguerite battled on, eventually collapsing with a bad back before she could sit her second-year exams (as her father had done himself at intervals throughout his years at school). Both parents understood her bitter sense of failure and humiliation. There was no more talk of academic qualifications after her return to Issy for her twentieth birthday in the summer of 1914.
It was Juan Gris, going through a sticky patch himself in Collioure that August, who restored Marguerite’s confidence by advising her to paint.13 The solution was warmly seconded by Matisse, who could never see much point in any other calling. Amélie, unreservedly in favour of opportunities for girls, said that for a woman to cultivate her gifts was a sacred duty.14 Marguerite combined an innate flair for design with a highly refined and cultivated visual intelligence. Her intrepidity and ardour, the combination of worldly innocence and pictorial sophistication conferred on her by her unique relationship with Matisse, enchanted his young admirers. Gris and Severini were both nearer to Marguerite in age than to her father, and she was three years older than Severini’s sixteen-year-old wife, Jeanne (precocious daughter of another famous father, the literary modernist Paul Fort), who posed for her with her new baby.
Marguerite had lived her entire life at the sharp end of the artistic avant-garde. By now she was her father’s ablest and most fearless critic, trained by him to be as hard to please as he was himself. As a small girl, she had spent hours with Amélie scrubbing the surface of any canvas suspected of betraying traces of the kind of charm likely to appeal to customers. As a young woman and fellow painter, she had no qualms about letting Matisse know if she considered a new work unworthy of him. “I am, alas, one of those who cannot see a house on fire without giving the alarm,” she told him sternly.15 She was inexorable, and if he sometimes quailed before his daughter’s judgement, it was for the same reasons that he had once dreaded submitting work in progress to Shchukin’s scrutiny: “Only decadence can come of a lukewarm attitude on the part of those who paint, or those who look” warned Marguerite. “You have to have the energy and courage to throw yourself wholly into whatever you’re doing, that’s half the battle.”
The pent-up fury of years of setback and frustration poured into Marguerite’s debut as a painter. A big glassed-in bay, built onto the main bedroom over the garden porch at the back of the house, became her studio. But her new career was checked almost at the outset by an ominous interruption. “I’m utterly crushed at the moment,” Matisse wrote in February 1916 to Derain, “because they have just carried out an in-depth examination… of Marguerite’s larynx, and for that they had to anaesthetise her with cocaine as for a major operation. After the examination, she had a three-hour nervous crisis which terrified me.”16 Matisse was filled with foreboding. The effects of cocaine on the central nervous system were difficult to control, always unpredictable and sometimes fatal. Any attempt to rebuild the damaged trachea would almost certainly fail, given the limited surgical techniques available at the time, but the only alternative was continued use of the cannula combined with repeated attempts to stretch the windpipe by inserting wads of cotton, and regular cauterisation to keep the passage open. Marguerite, who had borne these excruciating procedures for years with stoical endurance, now faced the terrifying prospect of experimental surgery. All her father’s old fears sprang back into action. “I’m crushed by this affair of Marguerite’s,” he wrote at the end of his long letter to Derain.
Jean and Marguerite Matisse on the steps of the studio at Issy
Jean also posed urgent problems in 1916. Long-term prospects were not good for a seventeen-year-old male approaching the third year of a war that consumed men and looked set to last forever. But the chance to fight for his country seemed almost miraculous to a boy who was bright, sensitive and deeply unsure of himself in a family where artistic talent far outranked practical ability. Skilful, fastidious and good with his hands, Jean took after his paternal grandfather in style and outlook rather than his father. He had always loved the powerful, sleek dray horses that drew the delivery carts for the seed-store at Bohain, Even before war broke out, he had been torn between wanting to work with aeroplanes and going for a soldier.17 Now it looked as if a sardonic fate was about to grant both wishes. Modern invention, engineering and design had transformed Issy, creating the successful industrial settlement along the riverbanks and putting the Morane-Saulnier workshop at the cutting edge of French aeronautical technology. The towns factories worked overtime to manufacture warplanes, and the military parade ground had been redesignated as an annexe to the airfield. Matisse could no more grasp his sons fascination with machines than he had understood his father’s head for business, and the atmosphere at home grew thick with the kind of suppressed resentments that had poisoned his own adolescence. The painter, whose father had once agreed in bitterness and rancour to let him have twelve months to try to become an artist, now capitulated himself, reluctantly allowing his own son to fill the interval before conscription at eighteen by taking a job as a trainee mechanic in the town.
Jean was always the odd one out of the three children, and the one who suffered most from loss of contact with their northern origins. Matisse dreamed of artistic success for both his sons, and Jean (who played the cello) was the first to face the full force of their father’s disappointment. He responded by developing strategies for avoiding head-on collision, cultivating the role of daredevil or outlaw with a saturnine streak that made him moody, aloof, impervious to correction and dangerous if crossed. His status in the family was summed up by a favourite story about the day the home quartet—Jean on cello, his father and Pierre on violins, Marguerite at the piano—was sabotaged by the cellist apparently playing from a different score to any of the others. Asked to explain himself, Jean said coolly that he had lost his place and decided to cut his losses, turn the page and carry on regardless.
When it became clear that the elder son would never make a professional cellist, their father switched his attention to the younger. Matisse persuaded himself in these years that Pierre would become a virtuoso violinist, fulfilling the musical destiny he always faintly regretted having turned down himself. A chance remark (which Pierre bitterly repented later) about a boy at school learning the violin had taken Matisse back to his own misspent youth, when he and Léon Vassaux next door regularly dodged their hated violin master by hopping over the back garden wall whenever he rang at the front door. Pierre was fourteen when his father bought him a Prescendra violin from Armand Parent, and arranged tuition for them both. Highly musical like all the Matisses, Pierre was serious, willing, anxious to give satisfaction but quite unprepared for what happened when his father—always acutely mindful of being handicapped as a painter by his own late start—took him out of school so that he could give himself to music. “He thought that by working very hard he could catch up with the others,” Pierre said gloomily, “and so I could do the same.”18
Being accepted as a pupil by Parent was no joke. The master had started out as a prodigy himself, making an impressive debut in 1883 at the age of twenty as leader of the orchestra at the Concerts Colonne (where Matisse and Vassaux began their musical education as students ten years later). It was Parent who first introduced Parisians to Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, going on to popularise French contemporary composers (Ravels string quartet was given its premiere in Paris by the Parent Quartet), and train a whole generation of young string players. Now he reintroduced Matisse to the repertoire of his youth. Father and son worked their way through Mozart, Corelli and Vivaldi, finally graduating together to Bach’s Double Concerto in D. “Father took up the violin as a discipline,” said Pierre. “That was not a pleasant way to play.”
Pierre Matisse playing the violin
In spite of his illustrious past, Parent proved a dry and uninspiring teacher who pounced mercilessly on Matisse’s false notes, and made Pierre’s life a torment.19 “Each time I went to him, it was like a purge that had to be swallowed.” At home things were not much better. Matisse, trained under martinets himself, instituted a routine that began with his son rising daily at six to practice scales for two hours alone in the salon. Whenever the piano fell silent as the child dozed off, he would be woken by thunderous knocking on the ceiling from his father upstairs in bed. Marguerite, painting all day in the studio, seemed to have got off lightly by comparison (“Lucky you,” said Pierre, “at least Papa cant tell when you stop”).20 Pierre wore his brother’s cast-off suits, a size too big, with the sleeves left long to protect his hands. He was forbidden to play rough games for fear of cuts or bruises. Piano practice in the mornings was followed by violin all afternoon.
“These exercises are a kind of gymnastics which you have to do in order to master construction,” Matisse had written when his daughter protested in Ajaccio against the dull repetitive grind of a standard liberal education.21 His letters to her had been patient, wise and comforting (“We are truly touched by your efforts—don’t wear yourself out by too much eagerness… try to be a bit content with yourself, and have confidence in the future”). But from his son, setting out to master the altogether more demanding disciplines of art, he required an adult commitment beyond the powers of a bewildered and increasingly unconfi-dent fifteen-year-old. Worse even than the punishing schedule was Pierre’s sense of his failure to please his father. He possessed innate musicality, and a natural touch that made the fingering come easily, but his belief in himself was systematically squeezed out of him (“It was crazy, because I just couldn’t do it”), leaving an abiding sense of inadequacy. It was only long afterwards that he could make sense of the disaster of his adolescence. “Obviously, if I hadn’t mastered these disciplines by sixteen, it was hopeless,” he said, looking back. “Besides, I had no talent.”22
Matisse depicted this deadlock between father and son in the painting of a child practising at the Pleyel miniature grand piano in the salon at Issy, which he called The Piano Lesson (“Yes, it was me,” Pierre would tell respectful young art historians in front of this canvas half a century later, “and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons”).23 On one level this is an almost wholly abstract work, constructed from vertical bands and horizontal bars, mostly black or pale blue grey, which define and articulate the flat, dark grey spaces filling three-quarters of the canvas. The human presence has been reduced to three rudimentary icons strung around the edges of the picture: a diminutive but particularly assertive version of the little plaster Decorative Figure, sketched or rather scribbled in the lower left-hand corner, and an almost graffiti-style rendering of the Woman on a High Stool at top right, both sternly focussed on the small, docile captive behind his keyboard at the bottom. Pierre’s face, skewered by a wedge-shaped grey missile and hemmed in by two of his father’s works, is surrounded, as John Elderfield and others have pointed out, by the trappings of coercion (the metronome, the hourglass and the iron grille at the window shutting off a tantalising green slice of the garden in which he was not allowed to play). The boy looks much younger than Pierre’s actual age, more like six or eight years old. Matisse’s own age when he, too, first encountered and rebelled against the drudgery of daily music practice.
Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916
The picture cannot be confined to any single source or meaning. It reflects duress: the authoritarian controls inflicted on father or son when young; the ruthless demands of art closing in on Matisse in his middle years, dehumanising him and all who shared his life; the crushing forces bearing down on France in 1916. What is incontrovertible is that in The Piano Lesson, where his domination of the real world is virtually complete, Matisse distills a sense of human pathos sharper than ever before or after. The pruning process that strips the central figure of individuality, flattening and stylising the soft, unmoulded, childish features, intensifies the impression of human fragility and helplessness at the core of this lucid, limpid painting which, like a Bach concerto, is at once measured, harmonious and steeped in feeling. “There are some Cubist vestiges in The Piano Lesson” wrote Alfred Barr, “but no Cubist ever surpassed the beautiful divisions, the grave and tranquil elegance of this big picture. Nor did Matisse himself.”24
The Piano Lesson, The Moroccans and Bathers by a River were all painted at the time of the Battle of Verdun, which began on 21 February 1916 and reached it’s climactic height in July when the British offensive on the Somme began to relieve pressure on the shattered French army, enabling it to regroup and retake disputed ground before the fighting was finally called off on 18 December with no gains on either side. Verdun was emblematic. Once the gateway for Germanic hordes massed against the ancient Gauls, it was now a citadel more symbolic than actual, commanding the country’s eastern border and confronting the lost lands of Lorraine and Alsace. Nothing could have been better calculated to outrage the French, drain their reserves and break their nerve than the Verdun offensive, which turned into a dreadful replay of the war’s opening campaign eighteen months before. The same massive, unforeseen attack was followed by sickening capitulation to overwhelming force. For five months the entire nation was gripped by a frenzy of horror and denial (“The French were to be fastened to fixed positions by sentiment,” Winston Churchill wrote grimly, reviewing German strategy in retrospect, “and battered to pieces there by artillery”).25 Queues formed at dawn before Parisian newsagents, as civilians followed each lurch and twist in the struggle to hold on ditch by ditch. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen disappeared in the shell-storms of Verdun, or died in atrocious holes and dugouts behind the lines. Matisse, whose impulse was to join them, felt that their loss coloured and tainted his survival. “I shall always regret that I could not be part of these upheavals,” he wrote, deeply shaken by a frank account from Derain (in Paris on leave in May) of this slaughterous mayhem. “How irrelevant the mentality of the rear must appear to those who return from the front.”26
This letter was written to the dealer Léonce Rosenberg on 1 June, at the height of the fighting, when it cannot have been easy for a Frenchman to contemplate the future, let alone to think calmly and without rancour about the long-term effects on combatants and noncombatants, whatever the outcome of the battle. Verdun made everything else seem trivial by comparison. “These are the important things of my life,” Matisse wrote, listing the paintings recently completed or still in hand in the studio:
Matisse, Composition No. 2,1909: initial sketch for the painting that eventually became Bathers by a River seven years later
I cant say that it is not a struggle—but it is not the real one, I know very well, and it is with special respect that I think of the poilus who say deprecatingly: “We are forced to do it.” This war will have its rewards—what gravity it will lend to the lives even of those who did not participate in it, if they can share the feelings of the simple soldier who gives his life without knowing too well why, but who has an inkling that the gift is necessary. Waste no sympathy on the idle conversation of a man who is not at the front. Painters, and me especially, are not clever at translating their feelings into words—and besides a man not at the front feels good for nothing.
The feelings that could not be translated into words found expression on canvas, above all in Bathers by a River (colour fig. 19), which Matisse took up again at this point. Initially conceived in 1909 as a scene of Arcadian leisure to go with Shchukin’s Dance and Music, and tentatively re-sited four years later in Morocco, this gigantic canvas measured well over twelve feet wide and eight feet high. Matisse now divided it vertically into roughly equal, hard-edged bands of green, black, white and pale dove grey, suppressed the waterfall, condensed the foliage and transformed his four columnar bathers—cutting off the head of one, severing another’s legs at the ankles—into massive, mutilated, stone-grey caryatids.
This canvas marked the reconciliation between form and feeling, reason and intuition that Matisse had been working on ever since he got back from Tangier. At least once a week he exchanged views in his studio with the young modernists who now took the place of Prichard’s philosophers (the rich Americans had gone home, and the Sorbonne students were at the front). Most of them were foreigners or army rejects, hard up and disorientated, only too glad to wrestle with pictorial rather than material problems. They included, besides the three main theorists of Cubism—Gris, Severini and their friend Pierre Reverdy—more intermittent visitors like the Mexican Diego Rivera, André Lhote and Le Corbusier’s future business partner, Amédée Ozenfant, who remembered their host expostulating so vehemently that his spectacles bounced on his nose.27 Lhote maintained afterwards that Matisse made up his theories only when he saw what he had done, unlike a true Cubist, who worked the other way round. Severini insisted that, on the contrary, Matisse knew precisely where he was going from the start:
I myself, having often seen his pictures in course of execution, can testify how much there is to learn from having watched, say, the lengthening of an arm revolutionise the whole or, next day, the changed position of a leg call everything in question once again until the work binds itself together with an invisible thread that will only ever be perceptible to those who respond to the poetry of painting.28
Matisse’s dialogue with Cubism was at its richest and most complicated in these months when Severini came regularly to watch him paint. Gris made a drawing in Matisse’s studio in 1916, analysing the little Cézanne that had almost been sold the year before, another powerful picture of bathers by a river that now added its own contribution to the energetic debates going on in front of it. “There was perhaps a concordance between my work and theirs,” Matisse said cautiously when asked later how much he owed the Cubists: “But perhaps they were trying to find me.”29 Picasso had certainly found him the year before, when he responded to Goldfish and Palette with a masterly, metaphorical self-portrait in his Harlequin. Matisse rated it Picasso’s greatest success to date (so did its creator), and openly claimed credit for having given him a launchpad.30 Picasso did much the same for him when he exhibited Demoiselles d’Avignon for the first time at the end of July 1916, in a new gallery installed by Paul Poiret alongside his couture showrooms on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré.
Matisse (who had two pictures in the same show) had seen Demoiselles before, probably soon after the canvas was painted in 1908. when it baffled and repelled him. Eight years later there were clear parallels between Bathers by a River and Picasso’s leering life-size nudes, also strung out across the canvas, also confronting the viewer head-on, this time in a paroxysm of rage and derision (which would come to seem to many an eminently sane response to the carnage of 1914—18). Although one is roughly twice the size of the other, both pictures operate on the same grand public scale. Picasso had turned a sailor’s visit to a provincial brothel into a manifesto for the modern movement. Now Matisse transposed his Arcadian or Moroccan bathing beach into a monumental image of grief and stoicism. The mood is lightened only by the sensuous beauty of the paint itself, the fine, feathery brushstrokes and glints of colour—exuberant greens, patches of sky blue, gleaming pinks on belly and breast veiled by translucent grey—which give human delicacy and warmth to the gravity of the figures and their semiabstract setting.
Matisse worked as always on a slower fuse than Picasso. When his painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1926, the public laughed and even the more respectful critics were loftily dismissive. Unsaleable virtually throughout Matisse’s lifetime, Bathers by a River was finally acquired the year before he died by the Art Institute of Chicago. Matisse told the institute’s director at the time that he ranked it among the five pivotal paintings of his life. It was not until 1990 that one of the work’s custodians in Chicago, Catherine Bock, first recognised the poetic, elegiac, perhaps unconscious metaphor underlying Bathers by a River, with its stately movement from left to right regulated by bands of colour—”as percussive and insistent as a drum beat”—its four grey witnesses or mourners, its lively greens on one side of the canvas separated from the funereal shades on the other by “an impassable trench or black maw, dividing past from present.”31 What Matisse called “the modern method of construction” enabled him to draw on ancient myths of the passage from light to dark, earth to underworld, in a canvas impregnated (like Cézanne’s Bathers) with nobility and passion. There is something heroic about his sombre, solitary effort to confront a reality that remained unfaceable for most of his contemporaries. “This work could only have been painted in 1916,” wrote Bock, “at the moment when the enormity of World War I was finally realised, but before the disillusionment and cynicism of 1917 had set in.”
At the time, those who took the train to Issy to see Matisse’s latest work, and tell him what they thought of it, fell mostly silent before Bathers. Roger Fry, enormously impressed by the contents of the studio on 3 July, must have seen it but said nothing.32 The equally enthusiastic Danish painter Axel Salto reported both Bathers and Moroccans being painted that summer, but was far more dazzled by Madame Matisse’s herbaceous borders and her husband’s African carvings in the salon.
… the small red-bearded man with the Chinese spectacles stood in a halo of sunshine and flowers as brilliant as the rainbow. As we came into the house from the garden, the light still sat full in our eyes, so that we had to wait momentarily for our sight to adjust to the half-dark room. In the room we noticed a table with a sculpture of a black man, and an army of house gods. The young daughter of the house, herself a painter, showed them to us in a subdued voice full of excitement. On the wall hung bunches of South Sea fruits. Their dark colours, hard gloss and spicy aromas suggested an indefinable feeling of the Orient.33
Matisse family on the studio steps at Issy with Walter Halvorsen and Greta Prozor
In wartime the Matisses turned their house into a meeting point and shelter for friends, neighbours, refugees, taking in stray foreigners and homeless artists, even putting up a couple of sub-Cubists—Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger—at one point.34 There was a steady flow of conscripts on leave. Prichard’s young friend Georges Duthuit spoke for many when he wrote to thank Madame Matisse for everything at Issy—”Your kind welcome, the pictures that always give confidence, the table surrounded by friends, the whole room brimming with happiness and sympathy”35—which made a return to army life easier to endure. But when Matisse sketched the visitors pouring through his house and studio, it was nearly always women who materialised at the tip of his etching nib or pencil. Besides Josette Gris, he made crisp little engravings of Alice Derain and Fanny Galanis, the wife of Gris’s friend the engraver Demetrius Galanis (who also had his picture taken). He sketched two small girls, Jeanine Chaurand-Nairac, who came to stay when her mother fell ill in her father’s absence, and Irene Vignier, granddaughter of the great Oriental dealer Charles Vignier, whose collections Matisse knew well. He etched his own daughter, looking purposeful and workmanlike in a dragon kimono, and a lively girl brought home by Jean, who had lost his heart in his first job to the boss’s daughter.36 “In the ‘14–18 war it was the women who emerged with new assurance,” Matisse said in retrospect (and his portfolio recorded the process at the time), “because they had to take on responsibility, and they didn’t forget it.”37
Amélie, always more than equal to an emergency, presided over this busy and hospitable household, organising support systems, dispensing comforts, clocking up record totals on the home production line of knitted socks (“She’s worked her fingers to the bone for the troops, Madame Matisse,” Camoin wrote appreciatively after finding a pair of woollen gloves wrapped in a letter from her husband).38 Issy became a centre for relief distribution. “A prisoner is always hungry,” wrote Prichard, who received fortnightly hampers throughout the war. “The food you sent to me was princely.”39 Pictures were dispatched to fundraising tombolas. Matisse’s wife and daughter became pin-ups for people who had never even met them. Duthuit’s contemporaries Aragon and Breton, in training together as medical orderlies, hung reproductions above their bunks of the two great portraits of Amélie, Woman with a Hat and Mme Matisse40 Prichard, who spent the war initiating his fellow prisoners into the byzan-tine mysteries of Matisse’s painting, constructed a kind of shrine in their freezing unheated barracks around a painting of Marguerite. “I know that we threw our burden on to you and Madame Matisse, and you succoured us as only great-hearted persons can,” he wrote after the war. “But more than that, you gave us your moral support too. It is easy to forget a prisoner. He knows that.”41
All through the summer and autumn, the distant thumping of guns on the Somme could be heard on still nights in and around Paris, as Flanders became a graveyard for the British army. There was no word from Matisse’s mother, or his brother, who had been sent home soon after the start of the Verdun offensive along with all the other deportees from Bohain to a routine of forced labour on starvation rations. Bohain was twenty miles inside enemy lines (“We knew there had been a great battle,” wrote an inhabitant, “but we didn’t know exactly in what part of France. Some said on the Somme. Others said the Marne”).42 Attempts to smash through German entrenchments at nearby Bapaume and Cambrai came to nothing. As the campaign dragged on, Matisse’s native region was squeezed dry to feed and fuel German fighting divisions. Bread rations for the French in Bohain had been reduced the year before to just over four ounces a day, homegrown vegetables and fruit were requisitioned, and there was no meat. Elderly or disabled civilians who could not work in the fields were forced to take to the roads (Matisse’s mother was sentenced to four days in gaol for refusing to leave her house). The coming winter promised to be exceptionally severe.
Matisse’s own anxiety made him particularly sensitive to other painters’ troubles. He went out of his way to visit younger colleagues, and buy their work. Severini, turned down by the Italian army on health grounds and struggling to support a wife and two babies (one died in 1916), would always remember Matisse suddenly arriving in his studio to buy a picture on the day the rent was due (“And God knows, the sale came in the nick of time for handing over that damned rent”).43 Matisse helped out again when Severini was hired to advise a Swiss collector hoping to make a killing from a capital investment in modern masters. Matisse introduced the Italian to all the Paris dealers, dropping everything to put together a collection that followed his own trajectory from van Gogh and Cézanne to Rouault, Derain and one of his own paintings (the collection would have shown handsome postwar dividends, if the French government had not refused to grant an export licence). He organised a second show that autumn to raise money in Oslo for French artists and their families, working with a former pupil, the Norwegian Walter Halvorsen, who was astonished by the time and trouble Matisse was prepared to give to each of the studios on their rounds.44
By 1916, people in Paris had learned to live for the short term. Rationing and shortages had given rise to a prosperous black market, theatres and restaurants were crowded, and the art world had recovered from its brief shutdown in August 1914. Dealers now did a brisk trade with foreign collectors from neutral countries (“The Swiss and the Norwegians buy a lot,” Matisse told Pach, “but the war has gone on a very long time”).45 It became smart to attend showings of the weird new Cubist paintings in offbeat locations, like the exhibition in Poiret’s showrooms selected by Andre Salmon in response to a programme picked for Poiret’s sister, the couturière Germaine Bongard, by her lover, Amédée Ozenfant. Matisse, who liked her style, attended Mme Bongard’s elegant concert parties and had two pictures in her first show.46 He was an enthusiastic supporter of contemporary concerts given by young musicians like the pianist Alfred Cortot and the rapidly rising Erik Satie (“Very chic, Matisse,” noted Satie after one of Bongard’s soirees, “ he admires me, and he told me so. How polite he is!”).47 All three figured in a series of manifestations held at the back of a shabby Montparnasse courtyard at 5 rue Huyghens, a studio converted from a wooden hangar “more like a broom-store,” according to a Parisian journalist unused to patronising events in a semi-slum.
Arvid Fougstedt, The Opening of the Lyre and Palette, 1916, with Picasso in flat cap and Erik Satie at the piano
This outfit grew from concert sessions put on by the studio’s tenant, an enterprising but penniless Swiss painter named Emile Lejeune, and his partner, “a Russian artist, no taller than a mans boot,” who turned out to be another of Matisse’s old pupils, Marie Vassilieff. Hyperactive and unstoppable as ever, Vassilieff was now running her own studio round the corner on the avenue du Maine as a soldiers’ canteen. Matisse became a regular at rue Huyghens, decorating one of the concert programmes with a portrait of the Swedish composer H. M. Melchers, and contributing a still life when Lejeune started showing pictures. On 19 November the first private view in Lejeune’s studio, renamed for the occasion “Lyre and Palette,” proved a huge success, with fashionable limousines lined up along the pavement, Satie strumming at the piano and poems specially written for the catalogue by Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau (proceeds went to the most prolific and penurious of the exhibitors, Amedeo Modigliani).
Marie Vassilieff, The Braque Banquet, 1916: from left to right, Vassilieff with carving knife, Matisse with turkey, Blaise Cendrars, Picasso, Marcelle Braque, Walter Halvorsen, Fernand Leger, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings and her lover aiming a gun at Modigliani in doorway, Braque in laurel wreath, Juan Gris
It was years since Matisse had been part of this kind of rackety student life. He spent the night of his forty-seventh birthday, 31 December 1916, at a party given to celebrate Guillaume Apollinaire’s return from the trenches and the publication of his new book, Le Poète assassiné. Moving among his eighty guests with bandages wound round his head and a Croix de Guerre pinned to his uniform, Apollinaire managed to irritate so many people that his admirers’ speeches were shouted down in a hail of insults and bread pellets.49 There was an even rowdier banquet two weeks later for another revenant from the front, Georges Braque. This one ended in uproar when Modigliani gate-crashed the party and narrowly escaped being killed by an armed rival, after which some unknown joker locked the door. According to Vassilieff (who recorded the scene in a drawing), the situation was saved by Matisse’s quick thinking and Socratic calm.50 Matisse’s own recollection long afterwards was that he turned the key himself from the outside and pocketed it by mistake when he left early so as to catch his train home to Issy.
True or not, the story reflects genuine isolation and detachment. Matisse was more acutely aware than ever in these years of the age gap imposed by his late start as a painter, which meant that he had always been older than his closest friends. Paris was full of smooth operators who had managed to exploit or evade conscription, but in the circles in which Matisse moved he was one of the few—perhaps the only person at Braque’s party—to have been discarded as too old by the army. He reacted to what was happening at the front with none of the scabrous defiance and black humour of a younger generation. Matisse’s response was sadder and more sombre. He expressed it for the last time that winter in a portrait of the great Impressionist collector Auguste Pellerin, who owned some eighty canvases by Cézanne. many of them bought directly from the artist.
Matisse had been visiting Pellerin’s collection at Neuilly for at least ten years, and he returned there three or four times in 1916, taking Halvorsen with him. It took a bold man to commission a portrait from Matisse at this point, but Pellerin’s courage was not in question, and he had considerable respect for his visitor (“Old Pellerin was always there,” Halvorsen said of their trips to Neuilly).51 The two had another link besides Cézanne. Pellerin had made his fortune out of margarine, like Emile Gérard, Matisse’s uncle and godfather, who had been the first person ever to buy his pictures. Gérard had died ruined and disgraced a few years later, but the painter must have mentioned his family connection with the margarine trade because Pellerin promised him a job for his brother as soon as the war was over (Auguste Matisse became a salesman in 1919 for Tip, the brand that had enabled the Margarine King to become Cézanne’s greatest collector).52 Memories of Matisse’s early years certainly fed into the extraordinary, virtually abstract variation on a Renaissance model he produced for Pellerin: a full-frontal, formal portrait of male pride and power, reinforced by the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur, the heavy gold-framed Renoir on the wall, and the modern magnates desktop trappings of hooded typewriter and blotter.
Matisse Auguste Pellerin(II), 1917
This is the most impersonal and strictly geometric portrait Matisse ever painted. He might have used a compass to plot the circular dome of the sitter’s bald head bisected by symmetrical arcs of eyebrow, cheekbone and curled moustache, with the black shadow of his chin precisely centred over the black rhomboid of his tie and the clasped hands below. But the rigid plumb line of Pellerin’s body and the black pools of his eyes could hardly be more expressive. This relentless, bleak, black figure invokes shades of all the bearded patriarchs who from his youth had reined the painter in and spurred him on, starting with the two hard-headed northern businessmen, Henri Matisse Senior and his brother-in-law, Gérard. The portrait invokes forces that shaped the painter’s life in a format that echoes a celebrated photograph of Cézanne in front of his Grandes Baigneuses, and Ingress even more famous Portrait of Monsieur Bertin. It also recalls Manet’s portrait of Georges Clemenceau, the old tiger who was about to become his country’s most impressive wartime prime minister. For many people Clemenceau came to embody what he himself called “France bleeding in all her glory”;53 and it is this savage, tenacious and heroic, even tragic aspect of his countrymen that Matisse painted.
Matisse, Study for the Portrait of Greta Prozor, 1916
Pellerin’s was the last of a series of dark wintry portraits, as constricted as they are compelling, painted in the wake of Bathers by a River. This was the first time in six years that Matisse had not gone south when the days darkened and the cold closed down in Paris. On 12 January 1917, in a letter thanking Paul Rosenberg for a New Year box of mandarins (“Its the only sun we’ve seen”),54 the painter reported rainstorms, flood-waters rising and coal so scarce it was impossible to heat the studio. Jeans eighteenth birthday, on 10 January, put the whole family in a state of suspense, which dragged on into the spring and early summer as his call-up papers were repeatedly delayed. France seemed to be disintegrating into anarchy, with civilian strikes, political turmoil, and mutiny at the front after a last desperate assault on the virtually impregnable Hinden-berg Line in Flanders cost the country another hundred thousand men in April. All through the time Jean waited at home to join the army, Matisse worked on the Pellerin commission, pushing steadily further and deeper into his own feelings as a son and as a father. He had initially produced a more naturalistic and far less imposing portrait that was rejected by the sitter (who bought both in the end, paying up in full when the painter refused him a reduction for bulk purchase). The second version, completed in May 1917, finally solved the problem Matisse identified for Severini: how to dominate and reveal reality through a process of abstraction.
Matisse, Portrait of Greta Prozor, 1916
He had reached the limits of the kind of formal and human interrogation begun in his Tangier portraits, and for months his work had been showing signs of transition. To celebrate the Steins’ return to Paris in the autumn, he had painted Michael in the relatively straightforward mode of the first Pellerin canvas, and Sarah with something closer to the boldness of the second. Neither painting is wholly satisfactory, partly perhaps because the Steins’ interest in Matisse had slackened now that they had lost the bulk of their collection (still held hostage in Berlin). He also invited Halvorsen’s future wife, the young actress Greta Prozor, to sit for him.55 Slight, angular, intense, half Lithuanian and half Swedish, Mlle Prozor was exotic and arresting in a strictly Nordic style. She specialised in Ibsen and the modernists, reciting poems by Pierre Reverdy at the Lyre and Palette in a programme introduced by Max Jacob (who said she was incomparable).56 She emerges from Matisse’s preliminary sketches as a relaxed and jokey individual, but in the oil painting she moves to another level of reality, becoming insubstantial, even ghostly, with black lips and a flower like a dead beetle in her hat, her head just clearing the top of the canvas and the tips of her elegant, slender shoes skimming the bottom like a creature poised for flight.
The Parisian model pool had all but dried up in wartime, but Georgette Sembat recommended an Italian that winter.57 Her name was Lorette, and she posed in November 1916 for the first of a series of canvases that would increasingly absorb Matisse over the next twelve months. Not that there was anything particularly seductive to start with about this Italian Woman with her tight lips and reticent gaze. The models hollow cheeks, sticklike bare arms and cheap, flimsy blouse suggest an almost nunlike austerity reinforced by the black cowl of her hair and her drab, sack-coloured skirt. Soft, feathery brushstrokes lick at the edges of the figure as they do in the portrait of Prozor, whose body seems about to dissolve into the tide of brown-orange colour flowing across the right side of the canvas, invading her blue dress in shadowy strips and triangles, spurting up beneath her armpits and occupying both her shoes.
Matisse, The Italian Woman, 1916
The painting shows precisely what Matisse meant when he said he needed the friendly human presence of a model to help him break through to a wholly detached, impersonal level of picture-making.58 The pathos that evidently touched him in this sad and wary Italian girl dressed in an outfit hopelessly unsuited to the freezing temperatures of a Parisian winter still lingers faintly in the severe black lines and angular folds of the geometrical composition enclosed by the ovoid of her head and hands. But Italian Woman goes further than any other in a long line of portraits, from Landsberg to Prozor and Pellerin, in which the fabric of the paint itself has all but absorbed its human subject, blurring outlines, merging forms, deconstructing the arms and hands, and here eliminating the right shoulder altogether beneath a swathe of encroaching, lively, grey-brown brushstrokes.
Pictures like this looked as uningratiating to contemporaries as any Cubist canvas. “Frankly, I cant see anything in Picasso,” Puy wrote to Matisse that Christmas from the trenches, in a tiny, cramped scrawl on three minute pieces of card. “Its not like that with you, for running
Matisse, The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, 1916–17
through all your experiments I have always recognised in your painting a call to my painters heart that touches me directly, and I shall always defend you against those who say you’re trying to pull off some kind of bluff. I’ve seen you made to suffer by and for your work too often to find those accusations funny—you are one of those always in search of sweeter perfumes, larger flowers, pleasures as yet untasted (those were the temptations of St Anthony).”59 Like a hermit in the desert, Matisse had now stripped away everything that was of no use, and therefore harmful, to him in the pursuit of modernisms strange new inner realities. At the height of his powers in the darkest period of the war, he reached the end of a process begun twenty years earlier (when he
Gustave Courbet, The sleeping Blonde, 1849: one of four Courbets acquired by Matisse in 1917
first encountered the work of the Impressionists, especially Claude Monet) by bringing painting to the verge of pure abstraction.
Matisse had emerged triumphantly from one of the most gruelling phases of his career with a batch of works so far ahead of public taste and critical comprehension that some of them would not be fully understood, even by other artists, for decades to come. But he had simultaneously painted himself into a corner from which there was no obvious way out. Early paintings of the Italian model suggest how hard he found it to move forward. The Painter in His Studio of 1916 shows her bundled in a corner in a shapeless green robe while the artist in the centre of the canvas, seen from the back and painted in a kind of shorthand, is barely more than a tense, naked, brooding presence with a palette at the easel. A companion painting, The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, looks back directly to the Studio Under the Eaves of 1902—3, painted at a time of desperation in a Bohain attic with the same drab walls, dark ceiling and bare wooden floor, also empty except for the work in progress tilted on its easel to catch the sunlight streaming through the window. Each canvas powerfully evokes the absent artist. The general sense of being imprisoned conveyed by the earlier painting has been transferred in the second to the nude model, Lorette, lying trussed up on the narrow studio bed in what looks like a net of thick black strokes or bindings.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Forest of Fontainehleau (detail), 1834: the figure of a young girl lying in a flowery meadow who captivated Matisse for the second time in 1917
It was Lorette who liberated (or was liberated by) Matisse. Together they embarked on a series of experiments that would open up new directions in his work for another decade and more. She first arrived in his studio at a moment when he was already beginning to turn to other painters (as he always did when his own work was in transition), this time to his immediate predecessors rather than the classical masters in the Louvre. He went through the Cézannes in Pellerin’s collection three or four times in the winter of 1916—17. He included a section of Renoir’s Portrait of Rapha Maître in the top half of his own portrait of Pellerin. and wrote wistfully to Paul Rosenberg to say how much he would have liked to meet Renoir himself.60 Instead he arranged for the Bernheims to introduce him to Monet, visiting the older painter several times among his water lilies at Giverny.61 Matisse bought his first painting by Gustave Courbet in November, going on to acquire four more in 1917, including a sketch for the richly sensual Demoiselle Beside the Seine and the lovely Sleeping Blonde.62 At the same time he looked again at J. B. Corot’s View of Fontainehleau Forest, with the girl lying in a patch of daisies in the foreground who had captivated him as a student twenty years before. “The picture makes a strong decorative effect,’ Matisse wrote to Walter Pach three months after his first session with Lorette. “The figure of the young girl lying reading beside the water on the flowery grass is delightful.”63
Matisse, Lorette Reclining (Sleeping Nude), 1917
The model lying ready to be painted in The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel is depicted in short slashing brushstrokes as a baleful human challenge. But the canvas-within-a-canvas barely sketched out in that painting turned into a pastoral idyll—Lorette Reclining—with the red daisy-patterned studio bedspread transformed into a floral meadow, and the clenched black figure on it reconstituted as a relaxed and graceful sleeping nude, more Courbet than Corot. For once the finished painting retains the fluidity and humour of the thick black line that leaps and glides across the paper in Matisse’s preliminary pencil sketches, greasy, sensuous and caressing, emphasising the supple curves of breast, belly, hip and haunch, catching two comically alert black eyes peering out from under the plump, rounded pillow of an arm, blocking in the vivid, swirling tress of hair that pins down the whole decorative composition.
Matisse, Woman in a Turban (Lorette), early 1917
From now on Lorette unfolded, becoming confident, expressive and adaptable. She had a theatrical gift for transformation, switching from ethereal purity to luxuriant abandon, seeming to change mood, age, even size as readily as she tried on costumes. She could sleep at will like a cat, retaining a regal dignity even when slumped, dozing, in her green robe and Moroccan leather slippers against a purple shape that might as easily be a throne as the bulging, comfortable studio armchair. Whatever her previous professional experience, she was perfectly at home with the Salon painter’s standard repertoire of teasing and provocative sexual disguises. She dressed up for Matisse as a flirtatious Spanish señorita in a black lace mantilla, put on a white turban and a Turkish robe to become the distinctly European inmate of an Oriental harem, and impersonated a Parisian cocotte, sprawling on her back at the painter’s feet in a peignoir and matching shift hitched up to show the frilly garters clasping her white cotton stocking-tops.
Nothing like this had ever happened in Matisse’s studio before. The nearest he had come to this sort of frivolity was when he tried to relieve the family’s abject poverty in 1902 by kitting out his faithful model Bevilacqua in toreador pants for the tourist market, and painting the actor Lucien Guitry dressed as Cyrano de Bergerac, with melancholy results.64 Now he responded to Lorette’s expert lead as spontaneously as a dancer taking to the floor. She released in him an observant gaiety and speedy, casual attack suppressed in years of strenuous sacrificial effort. He painted her energetically from odd angles and in exotic outfits, but mostly he returned to her simplest pose, seating her facing him in a plain, long-sleeved top and improvising endlessly inventive rhythmic variations on the central theme of her strong features, heart-shaped face and the black ropes of her hair. Sometimes he multiplied his range of decorative possibilities by importing a second figure, Lorette’s younger sister Annette, or an incisive and arresting North African model called Aicha Goblot. He even teamed the Italian sisters with a much blander hired model to pose for what eventually became the majestic Three Sisters Triptych.
Matisse painted Lorette almost fifty times, or roughly once a week, over twelve months. Recent commentators have taken it for granted that theirs was a sexual as well as professional partnership, but if so, there were no apparent repercussions at the time within the painter’s family, and no gossip outside it among his highly observant contemporaries. His absorption in Lorette had none of the emotional overtones associated with his wife and daughter (or even Olga Meerson), who had been his principal models up till now. She set a pattern for successive relationships with hired models in the future, each of which took on the obsessive, exhaustive intimacy of a love affair played out (whatever may have happened in work breaks) with maximum intensity on canvas. Matisse himself said long afterwards that it was his son Jean who fell madly in love with Lorette, and had to be firmly disabused of his dream of marrying her.65
Jeans mobilisation orders finally arrived in early summer, drafting him by his own choice as an aeroplane mechanic and giving him forty-eight hours to join his regiment at Dijon. Matisse seized his last chance to dash off a second family portrait, borrowing the format of The Piano Lesson (“The one in my salon with Pierre at the piano,” he told Camoin, “which I’ve taken up again on a fresh canvas adding in his brother, his sister and his mother”),66 and dramatically reversing its mood in two days flat. The Music Lesson recreates the living room at Issy as a lacy linear pattern, light-heartedly embracing the radiator and the music stand alongside the human occupants: Marguerite supervising Pierre at the keyboard, Amélie hunched over her sewing outside the open window, and Jean himself, viewed with a sardonic paternal eye as a truculent adolescent already turning into a jaunty adult male, signalling his independence with his generations key accessories of cigarette, paperback and stylish moustache. The picture does not attempt to explore the underlying strains in a family facing break-up and potential loss. Rather it suggests an exuberant fresh start, embodied by the jungly garden growth that seems about to burst in through the window and engulf the household, especially Amélie, dwarfed on the back porch by a wild, pneumatic, blown-up version of the clay Reclining Nude she herself had posed for ten years earlier.
Jean Matisse was drafted into an army more demoralised in the summer of 1917 than at any point in the war. Over twenty thousand men deserted after a wave of revolt swept the ranks in May, when whole regiments had to be secretly pacified, ringleaders shot and public access temporarily barred to Parisian stations receiving soldiers from the front. Jean, who had longed to go to war, found his jauntiness knocked out of him almost at once. His father told Camoin that the boy’s first letters home showed him already disillusioned with his metier as a mechanic. Matisse himself was badly shocked, on a visit to Jeans training camp a few months later, to find the young conscripts hungry, cold and dirty, living ankle-deep in mud without latrines or anywhere to wash except, once a week, in an icy stream. “They live like pigs,” he told his wife, giving his son his own shirt, buying him an army greatcoat, and posting after it a tin washbasin and a woollen jumper.67
By 1917, civilian responses had been numbed and coarsened by the impossibility of relating official communiqués to the reality they suppressed. Relentlessly upbeat reporting of guns captured and troops advancing on the western front had to be reckoned against the pitifully small parcels of ground gained, and the illimitable casualty lists. There was devastation in Matisse’s own home region of the Aisne, where the Germans had withdrawn to newly fortified positions, systematically blowing up bridges as they went, destroying crops, burning houses and reducing whole villages to rubble. St-Quentin (where the painter went to school) became a ghost town that spring, its population forcibly evacuated, its factories and public buildings smashed and pillaged. There was no means of knowing what was happening in Bohain, now only ten miles behind the enemy line. Measured by the general scale of destruction, the fate of Matisse’s paintings seemed, as he said, relatively insignificant. But the survival of either Shchukin or his collection looked uncertain in the light of reports of revolution and civil war engulfing Russia. Nothing had been heard of Matisse’s pictures in Berlin (they were apparently sequestered by the German government after America entered the war in April, an event greeted in France with wild enthusiasm).68
Parisians had long since learned to carry on living with guns booming on the Somme as routine background noise. Matisse bought his first motorcar in the summer of 1917 (a second-hand Renault, chauffeured in Jean’s absence by the seventeen-year-old Pierre), and tried it out on painting expeditions along the banks of the Seine, or through the woodlands linking Clamart, Meudon and Versailles.69 He still sometimes applied a terse structural geometry to corners of the garden at Issy—a flower-bed, a small pink marble table—or to the play of sunlight and shade in a series of beautiful, semiabstract paintings based on the nearest woods at Trivaux (“Corot reinterpreted by Gris,” wrote Pierre Schneider of Tree near Trivaux Pond, now in the Tate Gallery).70 But more often he stopped the car apparently at random, propped his canvas against the steering wheel, and painted whatever he could see through the windscreen with something of Courbet’s vigour and directness. Half a dozen or more of these small, unassertive pictures show a road or river stretching ahead into the distance. Matisse said landscape allowed his hand and eye free play—”These little things are relaxations, diversions”71—at a time when the future held only uncertainty and confusion.
Matisse, The Wind-shield, on the Road to Villacouhlay, 1917
He made two impromptu oil sketches of the chateau at Chenonceaux near Tours, newly sold by the father of a friend of Bertie Landsberg and young Duthuit to the Menier family.72 The chocolate-making, art-loving Meniers invited Matisse to stay twice that summer, the first time with his neighbours from the quai St-Michel, Marquet and Jacqueline Marval (who had moved in next door to Matisse while her partner, Jules Flandrin, was at the front). These three always worked well together, the two men cheerfully paying the forceful and flamboyant Mme Marval the tribute rightly due, in Marquet’s words, from mere talent to sheer genius. They planned to meet up again later for another working session in Marseilles, where Marquet rented a room each winter, regularly urging Matisse to join him in the sun. The sexual side of these proposals was not lost on Marval, who responded to male painters’ routine bawdy talk by stationing a wicker laundry-basket inside her front door to be filled up with sexy pictures by visiting colleagues, starting with Matisse and Marquet.73 The pair put on their usual comic double act for her, with Marquet’s pressing invitations to brothel-crawling expeditions on the old port countered by Matisse’s perennial excuses that he was too old, too feeble, too afraid of upsetting his wife. When he finally decided to take his usual winter break in the south, Matisse signalled his intentions to Marquet with another flurry of bawdy jokes.
Why he went is another matter. His departure put a stop to his sessions with Lorette, who, after twelve months of intensive, even obsessive collaboration, stopped posing for him that winter and never sat for him again. It has been widely assumed up till now that he left home after some sort of showdown with his wife, but the regular journal-letters he sent Amélie from the day of his arrival in Marseilles show no sign of conflict or tension between them. In fact both were chiefly worried at this point about their eldest son. Jeans posting to the airfield at Istres on salt marshes thirty miles west of Marseilles seems to have been the deciding factor for his father, who left Paris in mid-December without even waiting to hear the outcome of the latest of Marguerite’s periodic throat operations.74 Matisse had managed to get hold of an introduction to Jeans camp commandant through an army contact supplied by his old friend André Rouveyre. He caught the overnight train to Marseilles on Thursday, 13 December, booked in at the Hotel Beauvau (“I’ve completely seized up in the knee and kidneys,” he told his wife),75 and spent Friday night recovering at the local music hall with Marquet. The port was full of troops en route for Italy, and Matisse, who had to wait four days for permission to see Jean, calmed his impatience by experimenting with a brand-new, lightweight, portable paint-box. On his first day, he made two paintings in the harbour, followed, when it poured with rain on Monday, by a tiny portrait of the critic George Besson, who was staying in a neighbouring hotel.
The state of the young soldiers at Istres confirmed Matisse’s worst fears (“All of them long to get to the front,” he reported to Rouveyre. “Its a prison camp”).76 He took Jean back with him to Marseilles on a twenty-four-hour pass (“The men never get passes,” said the camp commandant. “They wouldn’t know where to go”), treated him to the civilian delights of shops, cafés and a night at the Variétés, and sent him back to camp by the dawn train next day, full of good food and wearing clean, warm clothes. “His heart was heavy when he left me,” Matisse wrote to his wife.77 He himself had caught a chill on the windswept flatlands round Istres, and proposed to cure it by retreating along the coast to the sheltered bay of Nice as soon as he had done all he could for Jean by firing off letters, organising food parcels and enlisting Rouveyre’s help to arrange an urgent transfer.78
Matisse reached Nice on Christmas Day, 1917, meaning to stay for a few days at most and taking a room on the sea front in the modest Hotel du Beau Rivage.79 The town was bleak, windy and deserted (“It’s freezing in this pig of a place,” he told his wife). His hands would scarcely hold a brush, and he had to wear sheepskin foot-warmers to paint views of the castle above the old town. When it snowed on his birthday, 31 December, he bought himself a new canvas and stayed indoors, painting his room at the Beau Rivage in sunshine reflected off snow and sea: “From my open window you can see the top of a palm tree—white lace curtains—coat-rack on the left—armchair with white lace cover on the back—on the right a red table with my suitcase on it—sky and sea blue—blue—blue.”80 He had used identical words to his wife on their honeymoon twenty years before to describe a blue in a butterfly’s wing that pierced his heart (the butterfly, bought from a souvenir shop in Paris, came to symbolise for both of them the common goal of their marriage). Matisse said he had seen the same blue for the first time as a boy burning sulphur in his toy theatre in Bohain at the climax of his famous staging of the Neapolitan volcano erupting in 1885. This was the blue he would succeed in recreating only at the end of his life in the stained-glass windows of the chapel at Vence. “Me, I’m from the North,” he said long afterwards, looking back to that first week in Nice when the weather almost sent him packing. “What made me stay was the great coloured reflections of January, the luminosity of the days.”81
His thoughts turned to his mother in the North on New Year’s Eve: “I’m sure that in a moment at eight o’clock Maman will be thinking of me,” he wrote in the hour of his birth to Amélie. On 1 January 1918, rain poured down all day. Matisse took a wet walk to the post office to send his wife a telegram, and sat down again to work on a second canvas with rain lashing at the window and surf crashing on the beach below. “I painted myself in the wardrobe mirror,” he wrote home next day. This was the last self-portrait he ever painted (frontispiece). It shows him at work, gripping his palette with a paint-smudged thumb, sitting on a hard chair in glasses and a shabby suit at the far end of his dark, narrow hotel room with an umbrella dripping into a bucket beside the washstand. The painter fills the canvas, his head pushing at its top edge, one leg cut off by the bottom, his back against the left-hand side, his hands and eyes busy with that other canvas holding the work-in-progress just visible on the right. The painting monopolised him for the next fortnight. It is a powerful, anti-heroic, oddly provisional image for a man approaching fifty with an international reputation and a key show coming up that would consolidate his position as one of the two leaders of the Western world in painting.
This was the first two-man exhibition to set Matisse alongside Picasso. It was brilliantly orchestrated by Apollinaire in collaboration with an ambitious young Parisian dealer, Paul Guillaume, who announced his intentions in a letter on 16 January, a week before the show was due to open, by which time it was too late for Matisse to do more than protest angrily that it was against his principles to make any kind of major showing in wartime. He suspected Guillaume of setting him up in a contest loaded in Picasso’s favour (“I see it as the boxing match between Carpen-tier and Joe Janette,” he grumbled to his wife, comparing himself to the Frenchman defeated by an American light heavyweight in 1914: “Its the height of manipulation to get hold of someone’s works while he’s not there in an attempt to demolish him”).82 The affair confirmed his view of Apollinaire as an unscrupulous hustler, and reinforced his mistrust of dealers in general, especially his own (several pictures had been supplied by the Bernheim-Jeunes, with whom Matisse had agreed to renew his contract on highly favourable terms the previous October). He felt that he had somehow been wrongfooted, taking particular exception to the “ultra-modern publicity campaign” launched by an unprecedented nineteen-second film clip shown by Gaumont News in cinemas all over Paris.
But the sensational repercussions of Guillaume’s show in Paris seemed like echoes of another world to Matisse, whose life had already taken on the same simple repetitive pattern in Nice as in Tangier. He rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. He paid a formal call in his first week on Renoir, dropping in regularly afterwards at the older painter’s house a few miles along the coast at Cagnes, but otherwise seeing virtually no one. Even Matisse was taken aback to find himself safely tucked up in bed by half past eight most nights (“In Nice of all places, it’s shameful”). Besson, who had turned up again to sit for a second portrait at the Beau Rivage, was astounded to see the painter settling into a frugal and monastic routine inconceivable to connoisseurs of seaside brothels, like himself and Marquet. “Forgive me, I’ve been completely ensnared by a woman,” Matisse wrote to Marquet, explaining his failure to return as planned to Marseilles. “I’m spending all my time with her, and I think I’ll definitely be staying here for the rest of the winter.”83
The temptress who engrossed Matisse turned out to be a plaster cast in the local art school of the greatest of all Renaissance nudes, Michelangelo’s Night. By mid-January, she was already beginning to absorb him as exclusively as Lorette had done the year before. Looking back thirty years later, he remembered a months solid rain before a sudden sunburst changed his life (“I decided not to leave Nice, and I’ve been there practically ever since”).84 In fact, the sun came out much sooner. He told his wife on 13 January that he was strolling out without a coat, and that work was going so well it would be a mistake to budge. Jean was on leave with the family at Issy, Pierre was toiling at his violin, and Marguerite was resting after one of the surgical cauterisations she now needed once a month. Matisse reckoned she could count on three clear weeks between treatments, and telegraphed his wife and daughter to join him in Nice. “Hurry up,” he begged Amélie. Envy of Besson (who had brought his own wife with him) and the activities of an energetic young couple in the room next door made him long more than ever for Amélie’s arrival, which he told her would make every day a feast day.85
He spent afternoons drawing at the art school (“I’m trying to absorb into myself the clear and complex concept of Michelangelo’s construction,” he wrote to Camoin).86 In the mornings he painted his room with light streaming through the window and no sign of human habitation except for the few possessions he had brought with him: a battered suitcase, a canvas propped against the wall, the violin or its empty case lying on a chair. “Remember the Interior with Violin” Marguerite wrote later, recalling the work awaiting inspection when she and Amélie came south in February. “Remember the state it was in when we reached Nice, and the discussion we all three had together.… You set out once more from a canvas already marvellously balanced by your natural gifts… to attack the hard place, the high rock from which you either discover a new horizon, or destroy the canvas.”87
All her life Marguerite had heard her father insisting that it was better to risk ruining a painting than to be satisfied with quick results, however harmonious and easy on the eye (“It’s always necessary to force your whole being beyond this level because it’s only then that you start to make discoveries, and tear yourself apart in the process”). Interior with Violin in its first stage showed a vase of flowers in a room with wooden shutters barred against the sun, except for a small flap opening onto a strip of beach, blue sea and palm fronds.88 The standoff between father and daughter at this point passed into family legend (“It was enough for Marguerite to say… it was pretty, for Matisse to take up the canvas again and bring it to the tense, violent state we know today”).89 He cut out the flowers, sup pressed his soft pinks and ochres, and intensified the light licking through the shutter like a flame by repainting the interior black. This work was pivotal: “In it I have combined all that I’ve gained recently with what I knew and could do before.”90
Matisse’s wife and daughter were in no doubt about the significance of this turning point, or the inner perturbation it exacted. The painter was practising the violin obsessively again (and so loudly that the management banished him to a distant bathroom to forestall complaints from other guests). When Amélie asked what had put him in this musical frenzy, he said it was terror of going blind, which made him determined to perfect his playing so that, if he lost the power to paint, he could always provide a living for herself and Margot by fiddling on the street.91 The chances of Matisse ever having to earn his keep as a street musician were remote. But his fearful fantasy suggests he already recognised the move to Nice as a gamble that meant staking everything—his settled life, his family’s income, his achievement so far as a painter—against an unknown future.
In fact it was Matisse’s elder son whose sight was threatened at the beginning of 1918. Jean had gone into hospital in February with an abscess on his leg, and been discharged after three weeks with the wound still open.92 Now he wrote from Istres to say he had developed abscesses on his arm and eye as well. His mother and sister left Nice on 6 March to visit him before catching the train back from Marseilles to Paris, where Marguerite’s doctors refused to answer for the consequences if she missed her treatment for longer than a month. Soon after their arrival the bombing changed pace. “There’s a wave of panic in Nice just now,” Matisse wrote on 23 March, the day the Germans began shelling Paris with new artillery of such unimaginable power and range that incredulous citizens all over France assumed there had been some mistake in the radio transmission.
“So it wasn’t a false rumour,” Matisse wrote grimly after reading the communiqué next day, which also brought news of fresh assaults on the front near Bohain between St-Quentin and Cambrai. The Allied armies fell back, unprepared for the ferocity, speed and scale of an onslaught intended by the Germans to bring final victory in Picardy and Flanders. Matisse rose before dawn each day to scour the papers (“The Germans have captured Montdidier, they’ve got it in for Amiens,” he wrote on 28 March. “The atmosphere isn’t at all reassuring here—and as I haven’t worked today, I’ve lost my usual ballast”). Communications were disrupted or agonisingly slow. Telegrams took days to get through, and telephone calls meant waiting for hours, often with no connection at the end. Matisse, who had had no word from his wife except a telegram requesting money, appealed to his bank manager and begged the editor of the local paper for information. Bitter cold gripped Nice. “If I could see the Germans being stopped, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Matisse wrote home as the battle raged. “Well have to trust in Joan of Arc! I can only embrace you all from the bottom of my heart—Henri.”
Marquet (who had returned to Paris, taking several of Matisse’s pictures with him) wrote from the quai St-Michel in an air raid to say that his neighbours had all descended to the cellar with Madame Marval at their head.93 “By now spring has come to Clamart…,” wrote the Danish painter who had been entranced by the Matisse house the year before. “Perhaps artillery fire has shattered the house and made great holes in the gardens pathways. It will take a merciful God to protect this place in the day of reckoning, which now seems so near.”94 The bombardment reached its height on Good Friday, 29 March, when a direct hit on a Paris church killed or wounded 165 people attending Mass. Once again the inhabitants fled the city. Cars were banned on the exit roads on orders from Clemenceau himself. Amélie dismantled the house and studio, methodically sorting and packing in a hail of postal advice from Nice, where her husband was driven nearly frantic by his inability to reach or help her. “I’ve been within a hair’s-breadth of leaving,” he told Marquet. “My wife tells me to stay. While waiting, I work.”95 He spent Easter Sunday alone in the art school, modelling a little clay Crouching Venus based on Michelangelo, while his wife dispatched all but his biggest canvases by train, in the care of Marguerite and Pierre, to her aunt Louise in the Parayre family home in Toulouse.
By the following week the Allied retreat had halted, and panic died down in Paris. Brother and sister took the train along the coast to Nice, arriving on 7 April to help their father move into a rented apartment at 105 quai du Midi, next door to his hotel. He described the three of them to his wife, settling down companionably together in the comfort of their own fireside while fierce winds lashed the sea. Both children thoroughly approved of his newly completed Interior with Violin. Marguerite posed for him each day, well wrapped against the cold, on the balcony of the new studio above the bay. Matisse also made a drawing of Pierre playing the violin, and used it as the basis for a strange, stripped-down painting of a standing figure outlined against the light, which he called The Violinist at the Window.
After Marguerites return to Paris on 18 April, Pierre surprised his father by adapting cheerfully and competently to a routine of domestic chores, hard work and early nights. Landscape was beginning to preoccupy Matisse again, and when the hotel and the block next door were requisitioned by the army, he found lodgings for the two of them on Mont Boron, the stony escarpment above Nice, where he could paint wild roses, pines and olive trees. They took the second floor of the Villa des Alliés (“For once I’m going to have to do a move without you,” Matisse wrote forlornly to his wife),96 a small, plain, suburban house standing among building plots in spiny scrub, a twenty-minute walk up a steep hill from the tram terminus, surrounded in wartime by trenches and temporary shelters for an encampment of Moroccan troops.97 Their rooms faced west, with panoramic views along the coast to Cagnes and across the old town to the mountains beyond. Matisse rose at dawn each day to watch the sun come up. “I feel like a human being again,” he wrote on their first day in the new quarters, 16 May, swearing never again to let himself be stuck for months on end in a hotel. Father and son lived simply, like students, fiddling, painting (Pierre was beginning to think he too might like to be an artist), and taking it in turns to do the housework (“Everyone’s astonished, especially that we do our own cooking”). Jean came over from Istres on a forty-eight-hour leave, and, after a delicious lunch cooked by the boys, they walked at Jeans request high in the hills above the town.
Matisse, sketch of himself taking a siesta under an olive tree on Mont Boron, in a letter to Camoin, 23 May 1918
Matisse made the most of this brief peaceful interlude of family reunion and contentment. He sent Amélie a drawing of canna lilies that spring with white petals pearled like a grain of rice (“Since I’ve never seen them in flower before, I thought you wouldn’t have either, so I drew them for you”). He decorated another letter with a little sketch in the margin showing himself, all bristly beard and thrusting lips, planting a kiss on his wife’s cheek while she presents her profile, looking young and firm with her hair pinned up on the nape of her neck in a style he found particularly charming. It was a graphic image of a partnership that always functioned best at times when the absorption and isolation required by Henri’s work imposed the greatest demands on Amélie. The practical difficulties and dangers that reduced him to dithering indecision only made her more unflappable. “My dear Amélie, you in Paris are astonishing…,” Henri wrote in an ecstasy of admiration on 21 May, after two shells exploded on the roof of his studio at Issy. “Were more frightened here than you are. Just as I’m about to depart from one moment to the next, you write: ‘Carry on painting quietly, everything’s under control.’ “ This was the tough, cool Amélie, as dauntless as she was resourceful, whom he had loved from the day they met.
Matisse, sketch in the margin of a letter to his wife, 8 May 1918
On 27 May the Germans launched a further massive offensive in the north, sweeping forward in three days to the Marne. By 3 June they were within thirty miles of Paris. “It’s dreadful to be here when I know you re at your wits’ end,” Henri wrote, “the only way I could ever be as brave as you is in my work.” But even painting could not distract him now. He caught the tram into Nice to wait for the communiqué posted every afternoon in the avenue de la Gare. Once he was obliged to swallow a beer to calm his nerves. Often he sat staring in disbelief at the passers-by going calmly up and down the street (“But then the people who see me don’t know what’s going on inside. I look calm enough myself, sitting over my coffee”). Marguerite left for Toulouse again with a second batch of canvases, while Amélie prepared the house for final evacuation. Henri packed his bag to join her, sending instructions as to what to save: his big Courbet was to be rolled (“better with cracks in the surface than left behind”), his antique sculpture buried in the garden, and his Moroccans chopped in half and posted (he enclosed a diagram with a dotted line showing where to cut the canvas with a razor)98 A telegram from Amélie telling him to stay put was followed by another announcing her own departure on the advice of Marcel Sembat. Henri wrote daily, distracted by anxiety for his wife, for France, and for the artworks that would have to be abandoned to the enemy. “But I think of my big paintings, which surely cant be left behind at Issy, especially the Bathers on which I spent so long,” he wrote sadly. “Courage, my brave Amélie, and be prudent.”99
At the height of the crisis, when the German advance was already faltering but had not yet been decisively stalled, Pierre had his eighteenth birthday, on 13 June. His father added a fond postscript in a letter to his wife, remembering the birth and the heroic early days of their marriage. For their son, the day meant liberation. “I was saved by the war,” Pierre said long afterwards.100 For three years he had endured the drudgery of daily music practice with a sense of futility if anything, heightened in Nice by contrast with his father’s passionate commitment to his work (“I paint to forget everything else,” said Matisse).101 With no company of his own age, no distractions apart from visits to the cinema, and nothing to look forward to but a promised outing to Monte Carlo that was perpetually postponed, Pierre had counted the days all summer until he would be old enough to enlist. Without waiting to be called up, he left alone for Paris to join an army desperately mustering reserves for a second Battle of the Marne that summer.
The Matisses’ fears for their sons were compounded by worry about lack of medical backup for Marguerite now that the family was scattered and Paris hospitals had been evacuated. Treatment facilities in Toulouse or Nice were hopelessly inadequate. Surgeons had been drafted from all over France to operating theatres near the front, and Matisse’s plan was to follow them. He proposed to rejoin his wife in the north, look for a temporary base where the family could sit out the fighting if Paris fell, and establish Marguerite meanwhile in a rented room behind the lines, probably in Le Mans, within reach of one or other of her two Parisian surgeons so that her treatment could continue. “You must surely know we haven’t come this far only to give up now,” he wrote to his daughter on 14 June, backing up his letter with a telegram “to tell her we would do the impossible for her throat.”102
Louis Joseph Guil-laume, Bohain after the occupation in 1918
A card had reached Issy at the beginning of the year from Henri’s brother, Auguste, to say that the Germans were beginning to allow useless sick or elderly civilians to leave Bohain.103 Now word came that their mother had at last consented to join the refugees straggling across Flanders on foot with bundles and handcarts, but Matisse knew his parent too well to hurry back to receive her. “I’m glad maman is getting ready but counting on her to be late,” he wrote to Amélie on 23 June. “She’ll never be finished. She’s going to want to clean her house before she leaves.” In the end it was his daughter who fetched him back from Nice, where painting made him forget everything else. Marguerite had been undergoing a new course of treatment since May (“The idea of seeing her again in this state makes me almost sick with fright,” Matisse wrote to his wife).104 Alarmed by the news that she had been too weak for cauterisation when she got back from Toulouse, Matisse booked the first available seat on a train, arriving in Paris on 30 June to confront her doctors. The shelling of the capital resumed next day. Matisse spent several nights with his family in the cellar at Issy, and swept up the glass in his and Marquet’s studios when bombs shattered the windows at 19 quai St-Michel. Amélie had planned to retreat to Maintenon, just north of Chartres, and after nine days of bombardment Henri himself moved there to reconnoitre the hotel as a possible family refuge, painting the viaduct to the sound of cannon fire, and narrowly escaping death when the train just before his own was wrecked at St-Cyr.105
In August, an initial counterattack on the western front was launched by the French from Amiens. Jean was serving behind the lines as a ground mechanic. Pierre, training at Cherbourg as a driver in an artillery regiment, was about to be posted to the front. When his younger son fell ill in a cholera outbreak on the northwest seaboard, Matisse left immediately for Cherbourg, reporting that seven of Pierre’s contemporaries had died on 12 September, and another ten the day before.106 Pierre himself turned out to have flu, but Matisse, advised by another grieving father to run no risks, managed to get leave to take him home. At the end of the month successive waves of Allied forces swept eastwards, pushing the Germans back across Flanders. British troops retook St-Quentin on 29 September, and entered Bohain on 8 October. Matisse was one of the first civilians to reach the town in their wake. “I feared to see my native land again,” wrote his compatriot, the historian Gabriel Hanotaux, describing his own return in October through an unrecognisable country of mud, craters, blasted trees, dead animals and twisted metal, blocked rivers, skeletal towns and gutted villages: “But I didn’t imagine anything like what I saw! In truth it was the death of the earth itself, a landscape of the Last Judgment.”107
Matisse, Violinist at the Window, 1918
Roads had been mined in Bohain, buildings sacked and the town hall set on fire. People had been living under shellfire in their cellars for two months, surviving on turnips, black bread and dried beans. Auguste Matisse was packed and ready to flee with his wife, his two small daughters and his seventy-four-year-old mother, taking only as much as they could carry. Forced to work twelve hours a day unloading German shells and shifting crates, Auguste had collapsed with tuberculosis, but his mother remained doughty, unbiddable and unbowed. The only things that had apparently frightened Maman Matisse were the Germans’ endless requisitions (“She trembled like a leaf,” Auguste reported) and the Teutonic thoroughness of their even more rapacious looting.108 Her home was the inheritance she and her husband had built from scratch to hand on intact to their descendants. “It was absolutely impossible to make her leave for France, in spite of all our pleading…,” Auguste told his brother. “We hurled ourselves against her obstinacy. She would not abandon her house to be pillaged.” She had sold her piano for food, and used the sheet music to wrap provisions. Henri found her, as he had known he would, preparing to bring out the treasures buried for four years in her cellar, and embark on a stiff programme of washing, rubbing, scrubbing and mending what was left. “I’d rather have them spoilt than know the Germans had got their hands on them,” she said, protesting vigorously that the first English soldiers to liberate Bohain had made off with both her clothes brushes.109 She had sworn to live long enough to see her eldest son again but, though she thanked him kindly for the gifts he brought, nothing he could say would make her return with him to Issy until her house had been comprehensively scoured out.
Matisse’s mother was indomitable, like his wife and daughter. The three of them framed and shaped his life, pointing him towards the stern and sacrificial path he followed to the day he died. Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot described Madame Matisse and Marguerite long afterwards as two caryatids or columns supporting the entrance to Matisse’s temple.110 The painter himself always insisted that he was by nature feckless, disorganised and chaotically undisciplined. On 11 November, the night the armistice was signed to bacchanalian rejoicing all over Europe, he brought out his violin and played a wild fandango on a café table. “Phew,” said Marquet, “well, mon vieux, if Amélie could see you now…”111 Just over a month later Matisse headed south again to Nice in pursuit of painting. At the very end of Matisse’s life, Picasso would evoke his presence in a ghostly painting called The Shadow, which echoes his old rival’s Violinist at the Window of 1918, showing the artist as a spare, taut, concentrated figure at an open window. It perfectly expresses the provisional quality of Matisse’s life at this point: the sense of stepping out, travelling light, starting a journey in which reality would find new forms and meanings in the world of his imagination.
