Matisse, Odalisque in Red Culottes, 1921
All through the spring of 1919 in Nice, Matisse visited Auguste Renoir, who was dying in his house, Les Collettes, at Cagnes. Renoir was in his late seventies, widowed during the war and so pitifully wasted he had to be shifted from his bed to the studio in a carrying chair. “He slumped in it like a corpse,” said Matisse, who had formed the habit the year before of calling in at Les Collettes after a day’s work on the surrounding landscape.1 Frail, gaunt, swathed in bandages and too crippled by arthritis to hold a brush, Renoir lived only to paint, which he still did every day with his brush-handle padded and wedged between his right thumb and forefinger. “You could pick him up in one hand quite easily,” said Matisse. “His eyes held all the life of his body, his eyes and his tongue and his poor, twisted, deformed, bleeding paw.”2 The visitor said that talking to the old man, or seeing him wince and grimace as he forced himself into action at the start of each painting session, was like watching the dead come back to life. “The pain passes, Matisse, but the beauty remains,” Renoir said with a radiant smile, explaining that he meant to live until he had finished his latest love song to health, strength and physical well-being, The Bathers.
The canvas had to be wound on a roller so that the painter could work on it bit by bit in his garden studio, a wooden hut standing beneath olive trees on a hillside above the sea with big windows to let in the light on all sides. The English writer Frank Harris said Matisse had tears in his voice when he described Renoir at Cagnes: a tiny mummified figure stripped of everything but intelligence, memory and the passionate will to transfer what he saw in front of him—two girls lolling on a grassy bank—to a deeper and more stable level of reality in paint. Renoir’s example marked Matisse indelibly. He looked back to it long afterwards when age and ill health capsized him in turn. In his first years in Nice, he drew courage and consolation from a visit to Cagnes whenever his own problems threatened to get out of hand.
Renoir for his part was well aware that he owed his unexpected late flowering in part at least to Matisse, who had transformed his last years by finding him a new model in the winter of 1917—18. She was Andrée Heuschling, a seventeen-year-old refugee from Alsace looking for work at the Nice art school, where Matisse recognised her plump graceful figure, red hair, pearly skin and wide catlike smile. “You’re a Renoir,” he said, packing her off on the train to Cagnes.3 Dédée’s gaiety revived Renoir, and she glowed in turn in the warmth of his inner vitality. Her lively, generous, affectionate presence animated the whole household. It also eased relations with Matisse, whose first visit, on 31 December 1917—his forty-eighth birthday—had been a sticky affair, according to his companion George Besson, who remembered the older painter’s amazement at the younger’s extreme formality (“It was rather like Rubens in the role of ambassador presenting his credentials to some aged Pope,” Besson wrote cattily).4
In fact, this semi—state visit brought back memories that still rankled with Renoir of the days when the wild young King of the Fauves had deliberately set out to overturn everything the Impressionists held dear. Matisse told his wife that the great man apologised indirectly later for his prickliness during that first encounter with Besson. At the time, Matisse had been paralysed by nerves. He went back again with his newly finished self-portrait to show Renoir how far he had changed since the Fauve years, but it was months before he plucked up courage to bring more work for inspection, and even then he almost gave up the idea, tossing a coin in the street to decide whether or not to leave for Cagnes with his roll of canvases. Matisse’s lack of confidence, inconceivable to people like Besson. was only too obvious to Renoir. “You’re talking to someone who hasn’t perhaps achieved anything much,” he said reassuringly after looking at Matisse’s work, “but who has managed to produce something that’s absolutely his own. I worked with Monet, and with Cézanne for years, and I’ve always remained myself.”5 Matisse confessed in return that however great his self-doubt, he always knew he hadn’t a hope of painting any other way. “Well,” said Renoir, “that’s exactly what I like about you.”
At the end of the 1918 season, when Matisse stood packed and ready to leave for Paris, he brought over a batch of his most precious possessions, feeling, as he said himself, like a Nawab spreading out his treasures before his host. They included Cézanne’s little Bathers, a couple of Renoir’s own canvases (“He said he was truly moved—people generally bring out horrors painted by me, but I’m happy with these”), and Courbet’s Sleeping Blonde (“He was astonished, and said he wouldn’t have believed Courbet could paint a masterpiece”).6 Renoir responded to one painterly gesture with another, proposing an exchange of canvases when the younger artist tentatively asked if he might buy one. Matisse, who had learned much as a student from Pissarro and Monet, and who revered Cézanne all his life as a god of painting, still thought of the Impressionists as belonging to another world. Even in his prime he could not quite put himself on an equal footing with Renoir—”I’m truly touched but I can’t accept,” he said, “I’m not worth it”—although Les Collettes was the nearest he got to a second home in his first unsettled years in Nice.
He came regularly in the early evenings to sit with the old man, who was gripped as the light faded by dread of the night’s suffering ahead. They swapped gossip, told frisky stories, compared notes about their beginnings (Renoir said he had spent the proceeds from his first picture sales on a sack of haricot beans to feed his children). Sometimes Matisse came for lunch bringing friends like Marquet and the young Halvorsens, who were often in Nice staying with Greta’s father, a retired Swedish ambassador. Walter had relaunched himself as a dealer in wartime (“You remind me of a lion tamer in the middle of the cage,” Matisse told his expupil,
In the studio at Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1917: Greta Prozor and Auguste Renoir seated, with Matisse standing between Claude and Jean Renoir, photographed by Walter Halvorsen
warning him to watch his back).7 Renoir rashly agreed to part with a couple of works over lunch, complaining to Matisse afterwards that he had palpitations three nights running for fear of what Ambroise Vollard might say. The two painters had developed a comfortable system of mutual sniping and support by this time. Matisse brought his wife to Les Collettes together with Marguerite, who was the same age as the middle one of Renoir’s three sons. Jean. Invalided out of the army like his elder brother Pierre in the first twelve months of the war, Jean had come home to look after his father and recover from a near-fatal leg wound. The youngest boy, Claude, a year younger than Pierre Matisse, was still a schoolboy. Matisse, who had one son waiting to be posted to the front and another about to be mobilised when he first came to Cagnes, understood the helpless fury behind his friend’s sardonic solution: “Renoir said it should be the old and infirm sent to die in holes, not the young with their lives before them.”8 Painting was all they could do. They discussed technique, reputation, posterity, the whole question of shifting focus and vision that had been the main battlefield for their two generations. Matisse explored Renoir’s work and produced his own latest canvases, describing his misgivings and the panic attacks which his host assured him never let up. Renoir objected to Matisse’s pure, strong colours, which contradicted Impressionism’s fundamental beliefs about nature so flatly as to be, in Alfred Barr’s words, “almost sinful.”9 He was especially indignant about a preposterous slash of black paint, representing a curtain rod in a painting of Matisse’s hotel bedroom, which stayed in place when it ought by Impressionist rules to have disrupted the whole composition. Matisse explained long afterwards how he did it, in a famous passage outlining the work agenda of his first decade in Nice:
It’s through a combination of forces brought together on canvas, which is the particular contribution of my generation. And it’s also, I think, the feeling of space that I always get from observing the models, and that even makes me put myself into the space. This space is constructed from a convergence of forces that has nothing to do with the direct copying of nature. It’s difficult to explain more fully because, with this sort of construction, a large part is down to the mysterious workings of instinct.10
As always when instinct showed signs of getting out of control, Matisse needed someone to help him stand back and assess his work critically. Renoir, taking over from Prichard and the young Cubists a few years earlier, forced him to articulate what he was doing as he tried once again to tear himself free of the immediate past. Arriving in Nice a month after the end of the war, Matisse had taken a room overlooking the sea in the little old Hotel de la Méditerranée, sandwiched between two more grandiose giants, the Hotels Royal and Westminster, on the promenade des Anglais. After four years of chaos and disruption, he had no time to waste. The exuberant New Year greetings he sent his wife at the start of 1919 already included a sketch of the basic elements—the dressing table, the balustrade and the swagged muslin curtains framing the bedroom window—with which he would construct and reconstruct painted spaces that broke all known rules of pictorial correctness.
On 2 January a freak storm broke over Nice. Seas pounded up onto the front, pouring across the promenade and turning the street into a rushing grey river. Winds tore off the hotel shutters, smashed the windows and shattered a big mirror in the entrance hall. “It’s so extraordinary that I haven’t enough eyes to take it all in,” Matisse wrote to his wife next day, painting the scene from his window with hands that still shook from elation and shock. The luminous, rain-washed atmosphere after a storm always exhilarated him. The main reason he gave afterwards for coming to Nice was the Mediterranean sunlight: clear, silvery and soft in spite of its phenomenal brilliance. He said he couldn’t believe his luck when he first realised he would open his eyes every morning on the same light. Now it seemed not only beautiful but cleansing and liberating. With its steady, unchanging light and its sense of being somehow insulated from the rest of Europe, Nice provided the pictorial equivalent of laboratory conditions in which to reshape the future.
To a Parisian, the town was an outpost at the back of beyond. Even the port of Marseilles at the height of its wartime activity had seemed like a different country at first to Matisse’s northern eye and ear. “It’s theatre wherever you look,” he said, describing the dramatic gestures and emphatic speech of the street-sellers, “or rather a circus.”11 Nice—culturally isolated, physically intact, geographically cut off from both France and Italy by mountains and sea—seemed to have slept through the war. “Nice is utterly Niçois,” Matisse told his son Jean. “I feel myself a complete foreigner here.”12 His sense of unreality was heightened by the old-fashioned décor of his hotel room: pink-tiled floor, rococo plaster-work and an Italianate painted ceiling lit from below by sun reflected off water, intensified and directed through shutters like stage lighting. Its artificiality (“Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious”)13 served his purpose as much as its anonymity. “Matisse is always the great devil who jumps up out of the box again as good as new,” wrote Besson, who watched him start the process of reinventing himself as an artist in Nice.14
Impressionism, which had effectively blocked off the future in the
Matisse, Interior with a Violin Case, 1918–19
Fauve years, now suggested a way out of Matisse’s current impasse. “Renoir’s work saves us from the drying-up effect of pure abstraction,” he said, explaining to an interviewer in 1919 that once you have explored as far as you can go in a particular direction, you must change course, if only as a matter of hygiene.15 Consultations with Renoir were always about work in hand (except that once Matisse sent home for a key transitional painting to take to Cagnes, Lorette in a Green Robe on a Black Background). From now on the problems resolved with such labour in the great radical canvases of 1916—17 ceased to interest him. One of the things that struck Halvorsen most about Matisse in his first two seasons at Nice was how calmly he accepted the prospect of seeing almost his entire life’s achievement to date engulfed by the general tide of destruction. “He watched everything collapsing around him.… The great collection of Matisses on show at the Steins had been sold. Of all the work he had produced in the ten years before the Great War, nothing remained. But no sign of all this showed in Matisse’s face.”16
By 1919 external events had drastically extended Matisse’s own instinctive stripping back. Of his key pre-war supporters who survived the war in Europe, Prichard had been broken by his years as a prisoner in Germany, Sembat was ill, with only a few more years to live, and the faithful Purrmann found himself stranded on the far side of a gulf almost impossible for Germans to cross in the rancorous first years of a precarious peace. Purrmann’s last great service was to retrieve the Berlin canvases at the end of the war and return them to Sarah and Michael Stein in Paris, but his efforts came too late. By the end of 1918 the Steins had secretly sold the paintings, apparently in a fit of financial panic, for a knockdown price to an elderly Dane whose persistence matched his shrewd eye for a bargain.17 Scandinavian neutrality, coupled with the unusually sophisticated visual understanding promoted by Matisse’s Scandinavian students, had produced a booming modern-art market for local speculators prepared to back their own nerve and judgement, like Christian Tetzen-Lund, who snapped up the Steins’ collection. But the transaction meant that at the start of the 1920s the only place in Europe to see a representative collection of Matisse’s work in the run-up to modernism was a private apartment belonging to a retired feed-and-grain merchant in Copenhagen.
Matisse himself had accompanied Halvorsen on one of several unsuccessful attempts to intercede with the Steins, whose evident embarrassment and strenuous denials were as dismal as the spaces on their half-empty walls. But there was nothing Matisse could do about even more worrying developments in Russia. Rumour in Paris said that his Dance and Music had been burnt or otherwise disposed of after the Revolution of 1917. In fact, Shchukin’s house and its contents had been confiscated by Lenin himself, to be reopened as a Soviet museum with the former owner installed in a servants bedroom and employed as guide to his own collections. Matisse, who had refused all offers for the Interior with Goldfish Bowl he had painted for Shchukin in 1914 (“It’s part of the decoration of his drawing room”), now reluctantly sold it to Halvorsen.18
Shchukin left Russia a year after the Revolution, slipping out of Moscow unnoticed to rejoin his family in aimless, if relatively affluent, exile in France. He set up winter quarters in Nice, where Matisse welcomed him warmly, taking him to see Renoir at Cagnes, calling on him at his hotel and hoping for a return visit. But a chance encounter on the street, when the collector turned his head away to avoid meeting the painter’s eye, made it painfully clear that this new, one-sided relationship could never replace their old, active, working collaboration.19 In fact the two men were at loggerheads. Shchukin, believing like most Russian emigrés that the Soviet regime could only be temporary, was dismayed to find Matisse too absorbed in his present work to pay much attention to the fate of a collection from which he had no more to learn. Matisse for his part felt hurt by Shchukin’s failure to respond to the struggle that consumed him in Nice.
Work monopolised him from the start. Throughout the first months of 1919, he complained that the road lay uphill, that he was toiling like a carthorse, that his labours exhausted him and made him despair. But he had no doubt that he was on to something. “As for telling you what it will be like,” he wrote to his wife on 9 January, “that I couldn’t say since it hasn’t happened yet, but my idea is to push further and deeper into true painting.” Four days later he acquired a new model. Young women prepared to pose were in such short supply that Paul Audra, the head of the art school, infuriated Matisse by sending her simultaneously to all the leading painters in the area, including Renoir.20 Perhaps Renoir recognised a prospective partner for Matisse in this new girl at the furthest possible remove from the ample, apple-cheeked models he liked himself. At all events she was soon posing regularly at the Hotel de la Méditerranée. Antoinette Arnoud was nineteen years old, pale, slender and supple with a quintessentially urban, indoor chic and the kind of responsive intelligence Matisse required at this point from a model. Over the next two years, the two would collaborate on a steady stream of paintings and an even more remarkable series of drawings.
Matisse drew Arnoud dressed and undressed, reading or lounging
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Gabriella in an Open Blouse, 1907
through their work sessions but mostly gazing gravely straight at him. In his paintings he added local accessories—a vase of anemones or carnations, a couple of lemons, a loaded paint-brush—laid out on the frilled muslin dressing-table top, with it’s oval mirror sometimes blank and black-faced, sometimes projecting reflections from odd angles in close-up, at others opening onto sky and sea beyond the windows of the narrow hotel room. He started a series of canvases on the theme of his model and himself at the easel (“A pale grey day, very tender pinks—” he reported excitedly to Amélie on 25 January, “and a pink rug on the floor—everything else is pearl grey, you can even see me in pearl-grey with my palette in the mirror”). In another series, he posed Arnoud on an upright chair in the open door of the balcony wearing a fashionably short, loose tunic, with a green umbrella, mauve stockings and big dark bows on her chunky high heels. In the most extreme of this sequence, Woman with a Green Parasol on a Balcony, light spills and splashes in streaks of muted grey, blue and black paint, enveloping an almost geometric composition—the highly stylised woman, the doorway, the balustrade, vertical strips of the beach and the sea beyond—in an austere, self-sufficient space of its own.
This was one of those major transitional phases when Matisse needed a model to humanise the ordeal of painting. He took on Arnoud initially as a stand-in for his daughter, whose health prevented her from joining him at the beginning of 1919 to continue in Nice a series of paintings started at Issy before she went into hospital. Marguerite had dressed up for him in outfits designed by Germaine Bongard, with hats—a furtrimmed cap, a smart little toque of blue feathers, an absurd velvet bonnet shaped like a giant puffball—from a favourite milliner on the rue Royale. Now he himself produced a sumptuous confection made from a cheap Italian straw hat with a single white ostrich plume curling and frothing over the brim and yards of blue-black ribbon looped underneath.21 Matisse, who had married into a family of Parisian modistes, grasped instantly the style best suited to this latest model (who would go on when she left him to work for the smartest dress store in town). Arnoud wore the new hat with a flair and panache that made a simple white peignoir seem like a ball gown. By turns stylish, seductive and demure as a schoolgirl, she could look stately wearing nothing but her hat. As summer drew on, Matisse trimmed a second hat with flowers and took her round the headland to the bay of Villefranche, where she posed beneath a pink parasol in an old-fashioned, high-necked, long-sleeved white frock on a hotel terrace with turquoise-blue flowerpots and a blue balustrade.
Daily painting sessions alternated with hours on end devoted to drawing, a corrective Matisse would use from now on whenever he felt his work was in danger of losing its balance between colour and feeling on the one hand, and line and form on the other. At the end of this first postwar season in Nice, he told the Scandinavian critic Ragnar Hoppe that he was trying to reconquer ground he had been forced to give up for the sake of simplicity and concentration. Now he hoped to find a way of retaining clarity, concision and force without sacrificing volume, spatial depth, the individual character and texture of fur, feathers, fluff, fabric or flowers. He returned over and over again to a lace collar, drawing it first in minute detail (“each mesh, yes, almost each thread”) until he had got it by heart and could translate it at will with two swift lines “into an ornament, an arabesque, without losing the character of lace, and of that Matisse, particular lace.”22 The same procedure was repeated with Arnoud’s embroidered tunic, her hat, hair, hands and face. Matisse was evolving methods he would use for the rest of his life. He published fifty of these drawings in a portfolio called Cinquante Dessins to coincide with his exhibition
Matisse Antoinette with long Hair, 1919
Matisse, The Plumed Hat, 1919
at Bernheim-Jeune in 1920. A surge of renewed energy pulses between the lines of the letters he wrote home as he drew them.
Living, sleeping and working in one small room, he had finally succeeded in narrowing his existence down to painting alone. “I’m the hermit of the promenade des Anglais,” he wrote to his wife, well aware how penitential his routine looked to outsiders, “that would make a good title for Max Jacob.”23 He broke off work to select pictures and supervise their hanging by post for his first one-man show in six years at Bernheim-Jeune. returning so eagerly to his easel that he forgot all about the opening on 2 May.24 The blatantly unnaturalistic Woman with a Green Parasol on a Balcony caused a minor flurry in Paris (this canvas, nicknamed “Woman with No Eyes,” struck André Breton as the most significant thing Matisse had done since his masterly Goldfish with Palette).25 But for the most part the new work was cheekily dismissed as old hat by up-to-date youth in the person of Jean Cocteau, who (like Renoir) had stereotyped Matisse as a Fauve painter, and knew next to nothing about what he had done since.
Apart from Arnoud, Renoir and the staff at the art school, Matisse knew virtually no one save a few fellow Parisian exiles like the Bessons, who followed him to Nice for six weeks, Count Prozor and the Halvorsens, and an old Montparnasse neighbour, the novelist Jules Romains, with whom he often took coffee after lunch. The Sembats arrived to inspect the latest canvases in May, and Marquet came over from Marseilles to keep Matisse company and do his best to subvert him with a tour of local brothels. As usual Matisse missed his family and followed their doings by post, encouraging his mother to move with her maid to Issy, fixing up his brother with an agency for Pellerin’s margarine, urging Pierre to restart violin lessons and Jean to cut down on smoking.
But bleaker anxieties underlay the optimism in Matisse’s letters that spring. Decisions about Marguerite’s future could not be postponed. She herself was tormented by fears that even her habitual stoicism could no longer conceal. Her father sent encouragement, advice, instructions to read less and paint more, and reminders to submit to the periodic ordeal of having her tube changed. Her doctors’ definitive report in March diagnosed ongoing constriction of the windpipe exacerbated by years of wearing a metal canula, and caused by defective development that went back to the first tracheotomy.26 The proposed alternatives were either to do nothing or to perform a final laryngo-tracheotomy in an attempt to rebuild the damaged airway. The first meant more or less slow deterioration almost certainly ending in suffocation. The second relied on pioneering techniques made possible only because of unprecedented surgical advances in wartime, but still problematic, with a record of repeated failure. This operation was eventually scheduled for late May.
The surgical procedures were risky, and the subsequent healing process even more so in an age without antibiotics. It was agreed that Matisse, always apt to make himself sick with fright where Marguerite was concerned, should stay well away, returning only after the initial intervention, when she would need all the support she could get to see her through convalescence. “Until very soon, dear Marguerite,” he wrote in May. “I dearly hope this will be the last station of your Calvary—say that to yourself over and over.” Amélie, as devastated as her husband by Marguerite’s predicament, was her old calm, confident self in a crisis. Pierre stood in for his father, taking three weeks’ leave from a new regimental posting in Paris so as to be able to drive his mother and sister to and from hospital. The Matisses’ regular doctor and his wife, both family friends, offered private and professional backup.
Amélie kept the exact timing of the operation from Henri, contacting him the same day to let him know things had gone well so far. “Be patient,” he wrote immediately to Marguerite, whose tendency to despair he understood only too well. “You’ve already come through so much, almost by accident, that you can’t give up now you’ve embarked on a meticulously planned procedure that has already been tried out, and succeeded several times. I don’t think your surgeon would risk having a failure on his hands.”27 Apprehension was swamped by tidal waves of relief. Matisse told his daughter it took real courage to finish his painting season in Nice, when he longed to be with her in Paris. She still had to breathe through a temporary tube that was due for removal, if all went according to plan, once her throat had healed sufficiently for a further graft of cartilage to close the hole in the windpipe. “Remember the anxiety we went
Matisse, Tea in the Garden, 1919
through this time last year over the tube in my larynx,” Marguerite wrote in retrospect, describing the submerged nervous tensions that had built up at Issy through the summer and autumn, when no one dared mention how much might yet go wrong.28
But relief was still uppermost when Matisse returned home at last, having paid what he must have suspected was his final visit to Renoir, who told him he meant to finish his Bathers before he died (“And, in fact, that’s what happened,” Matisse said with approval long afterwards).29 He reached Paris in the week of the official victory celebrations that engulfed the city on 28 June. “I’m the happiest man in the world,” he told the Swedish interviewer who caught him at his sunniest and most expansive that month.30 He gloried in the flowers in his garden, painting poppies going off like fireworks and a brilliant bouquet for Bastille Day on 14 July. The whole family regrouped, including the dog and the accommodating young model Matisse had brought back from Nice. He captured their mood of serenity in the last great work he ever made at Issy, a painting of his daughter, gentle and relaxed in a summery frock, cradling the cat and drinking lemonade with Antoinette Arnoud at a pink marble table under the nut trees in the back garden.
Tea in the Garden is a pastoral idyll full of rustling movement and dappled light. Matisse picked a canvas roughly similar in size and shape to the other great decorative compositions set at Issy over the past decade, from Harmony in Red to The Painter’s Family and The Music Lesson. The grouping is jokey and informal, the palette soft and low-keyed, the treatment straight-forward except that, when the painter came to his daughter’s face, his brush jerked back to the old, fierce, expressive habit of abstraction. Like practically everything he did, Matisse’s Tea was at once too literal-minded and too sophisticated to please its public. Bernheim-Jeune claimed they could have sold the picture forty times over if it weren’t for the dog looking up from scratching her fleas, and the unsightly blur distorting Marguerites features.31 Perhaps potential customers sensed the elegiac undertones in a picture that marked multiple farewells: to a style of painting that had served its purpose (the tea table—up-ended, flattened and severely dysfunctional in the Pink Marble Table of 1917—now resumed its familiar three-dimensional format); to the house and garden that had generated so many masterpieces; and to the life the family had led there together.
Serge Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky turned up one day in early summer to commission sets for the Ballets Russes. Matisse, who had already turned down their proposal and had no intention whatever of changing his mind, was seduced in his own living room at Issy partly by Diaghilev—a man whose charm could revive a corpse, according to the London impresario Charles B. Cochran32—but partly also by the images projected on his internal screen as he listened to Stravinsky strumming out themes at the piano from Le Chant du rossignol. The Russians envisaged something richly Oriental, preferably barbaric, probably in black and gold, but Matisse saw Hans Christian Andersen’s Chinese fairy tale as a myth about resuscitation and renewal, “spring-like, very fresh and youthful, and I couldn’t see what on earth that had to do with black-and-gold sumptuosity.”33 He imagined the central confrontation between Death and the Nightingale in terms of simple shapes, clear light and pure colour. “Well, that’s it!” cried Diaghilev, when the painter outlined his idea. “There’s your décor all settled.… It’s absolutely essential you do it… there’s no one but you who could do it.” Diaghilev swept out in triumph, ignoring his host’s feeble protests. But Matisse by his own account was haunted over the next few weeks by his vision of the life-giving Nightingale, and grew increasingly impatient to hear again from Diaghilev.
The upshot was that Matisse agreed to design the Rossignol ballet for an opening at the Paris Opéra in the New Year alongside Picasso’s Tricorne and André Derain’s Boutique fantasque, a spectacular triple coup to mark the Ballets Russes’ peacetime comeback. Diaghilev returned to the company’s current headquarters in London to prepare for the start of their autumn season at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, on 29 September. Matisse apparently heard nothing more from him until he was summoned by telegram for an urgent consultation that autumn. He crossed the Channel reluctantly, on 12 October, only to be confronted with an ultimatum: Either he stayed put in London long enough to design and deliver the Rossignol sets, or the company would manage without him.34 He and Diaghilev went through the same routine as before, a pattern of outrageous demands, determined resistance and rapid capitulation that set the tone for a collaboration rooted, on Matisse’s side, in resentment rising to crescendos of rage and loathing. “Diaghilev is Louis XIV” was his final verdict, delivered with hindsight in the relative calm of old age.35
Overruled, unprepared and disorientated, Matisse seemed to himself at the time to be lost in a thick London fog that was both actual and metaphysical. Speaking virtually no English (“Tell Pierre I daren’t even say yes”), unable to buy a stamp or find his way back from the theatre to his room at the Savoy Hotel, fuming at his own folly, cursing the Ballets Russes, he was consumed by the sense that each day given to Rossignol was stolen from his real work, a sacrifice no man on earth could have forced him to make but Diaghilev. “You’ve no idea what he’s like, that man,” he complained to Amélie. “He’s charming and maddening at the same time—he’s a real snake—he slips through your fingers—at bottom the only thing that counts is himself and his affairs.”36
Matisse had met his match in point of obstinacy, but he also recognised a creative will that, like his own, acknowledged no limits to the power of imagination. It was his own vision that Matisse could not resist, and Diaghilev knew it. The painter had come with no set designs, no precise idea where to start, nothing but an unformed concept at the back of his mind. He told his wife he felt the same blind panic as had paralysed him initially on his first trip to Morocco. He called on Prichard and William King, who recommended the Victoria and Albert Museum (“Marvels such as rugs of all kinds, costumes, carpets, faience,” said Matisse, who allowed himself a whole day there),37 and a quick tour of the Chinese department at the British Museum (the painter said it was a revelation and that his guide was a poet, presumably Kings close friend Arthur Waley).38
But when Matisse finally got to grips with practicalities, he reverted to his own earliest intuitive beginnings, building himself a toy theatre out of a wooden crate as he had done more than thirty years before as a schoolboy in Bohain. This time the packing case was a scale model of the Empire Theatre, with state-of-the-art electric lighting specially fitted in the lid by the stage carpenter.39 Matisse chose sky blue as before for his décor, essentially a brightly lit space with props and costumes once again cut out of coloured paper. Diaghilev’s Russian set painter was amazed by the Frenchman’s unorthodox methods (“He set to work in the studio, scissors in hand, cutting out and piecing together a model”),40 and by his ignorance of conventional stage technique.
Matisse said he conceived his décor “like a painting, only with colours that move.”41 The moving colours were the costumes, embroidered with strips of silver or dotted with yellow flowers to act as what he called light splashes. His lighting effects were painterly rather than mechanical, relying relatively little on the still crude and primitive resources of electricity. He devised what the only surviving detailed, firsthand account of this ballet described as “a hundred ingenious, elegant and logical ways” of using colour to make light. The curtain rose on sixteen dancers with painted lanterns, vermilion outside and lemon yellow inside to render them luminous (“more so than an electric light-bulb”) against the turquoise back-drop. The warriors’ armour was black (“the blue-black of a crow’s wing, since a pure black would look reddish”). The mourners in the final scene on a darkened stage wore light-absorbent white felt robes decorated by midnight-blue velvet triangles, “which spread gloom over the whole décor.” The final coup de théâtre was a more sophisticated modern equivalent of the burning sulphur of Matisse’s boyhood. Andersen’s story ends with the song of the nightingale breathing life back into the dying Chinese Emperor. Matisse proposed that the Emperor should rise from his dimly lit deathbed and reverse his black cloak to unroll a gold-embroidered crimson lining twelve feet long on a stage inundated by a blaze of electricity under a billowing white skycloth cut in great black-edged festoons to give, in the painter’s own words, “the impression of a crystal ceiling lit by the full white light of day.”
By the end of his first week, Matisse was working from nine in the morning until late at night, too busy to write home or walk round the back of his hotel to look at the Thames. He worked in the company’s scene-shop at the top of the basket store belonging to the Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable market. The only way to reach it was by climbing a long, narrow ladder in the dark, clutching a rope rail in one hand and a lighted taper in the other. One night flames from a building on fire in the market lit up the whole loft. “Look,” said Matisse, “the pink reflections turn orange against my blue. What if I made my costumes pink…”42 Diaghilev and his choreographer, Léonide Massine, called daily to inspect the work, take Matisse out to lunch, calm his fears and test out his ideas in the theatre itself. When his colours didn’t work on stage (“What looks good in the daytime looks wrong after dark, and vice versa”), they spent
Matisse, costume for a Mandarin in Le Chant du rossignol, 1920
the rest of the night discussing the problem with him. Matisse had got on well with Massine from the start, and now his distrust of Diaghilev was overlaid by unwilling admiration. “You cant imagine what its like, the Ballets Russes—there’s absolutely no fooling about here—It’s an organisation where no one thinks of anything but his or her work—I’d never have guessed this is how it would be.”43 His ordeal ended with a six-hour session in the scene-shop (Diaghilev, who was out to lunch, sent over a slice of smoked salmon to keep Matisse going), by the end of which the décor was done. “They’re enchanted,” Matisse wrote to his wife on 24 October. “Now all that remains is to paint it to scale, and do the costumes.”
He returned to Paris with Diaghilev and Massine at the beginning of November to discuss costumes with one of France’s top theatrical costumiers, Marie Muelle, who announced that the Emperors cloak alone would take her team of embroiderers three months to complete. Matisse replied he could do it himself in three days by laying the red stuff on the floor, cutting an imperial dragon out of the kind of ready-made cloth-of-gold sold in department stores, assembling the different sections and tacking them down. The only designer in Paris prepared to connive at this monstrous violation of the laws of haute couture was Paul Poiret, roped in by Diaghilev, who found himself worsted for the first and only time by Matisse on their first day in Poiret’s workshop. The painter spotted a fabulous, and fabulously expensive, roll of red velvet, ruthlessly overriding the impresario’s pleas that he had already bought the fabric (“You showed me a sample of cotton velvet in a fake red, a dark velvet, a dead velvet that didn’t sing at all”).44 Matisse took his shoes off and mounted a vast cutting table “like a trampoline,” with the velvet spread out beneath his bare feet, shaping and placing his scraps of gold stuff, attended by four or five of Poiret’s assistants to pin and stitch at his direction. The great cloak was finished in two days. Matisse looked back with pride afterwards on this heroic feat, adapting the method for the huge wall decorations commissioned twelve years later by the Barnes Foundation in America, and reverting to it again at the end of his life for the stained-glass windows at Vence and the majestic cut-paper works that followed.
Matisse returned to London for an opening of his own on 15 November at the Leicester Galleries, opposite the theatre: a modest show of recent small paintings which sold out almost immediately, to his own and the owners’ surprise. “These English are mad,” said Matisse, as he watched one of them buy seven of his works in a single swoop.45 All London came, from Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and the rest of what was about to become the Bloomsbury set to Arnold Bennett, pillar of the opposing faction (who bought a drawing), and the future head of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark (then a seventeen-year-old schoolboy unable to sleep for excitement). Over the next few days the gallery and its quiet, friendly, unassuming proprietor, Oliver Brown, provided a haven of refuge from Diaghilev, who now precipitated a final explosive showdown that began with Matisse threatening to walk out, and ended with him meekly agreeing to paint a drop-curtain nineteen metres wide. “I daresay hell change his mind when he sees the curtain,” Matisse wrote grimly, planning to curb the Russians taste for eye-catching excess once and for all by cutting back on his reds and blues, and eliminating yellow altogether from what was essentially a minimalist design in black and white.46 He sketched it out in five days flat before catching the boat-train for Paris, and left the scene painter to finish the job.
Matisse could not get over the waste of two months’ good working time given up to London’s impenetrable mists instead of the Mediter-ranean sun. He got back to Nice at last on 12 December, just too late to see Renoir, who had died the previous week. The Hotel de la Méditerranée had let his old room, so he had to move into another, with no balcony. At the end of the month, Arnoud found a better job and gave up posing, leaving him to make do with her larger, plainer, round-faced sister, who turned up irregularly and had none of her sibling’s finesse. Matisse’s mother was ill in Bohain, and his daughter’s condition increasingly precarious in Paris. The ballet continued to give trouble, forcing him back to the capital to supervise costumes for a week before the première, which was postponed at the last minute by an orchestra strike. When it finally opened on 2 February 1920, Rossignol fell flat. The fashionable Parisian public, enchanted by the gaiety and throwaway wit of Derain’s Boutique fantasque, beginning to get the hang of Picasso’s crazy Cubistic visual wisecracking in Parade, could make nothing of dancers treated as moving colours in Matisse’s bare, light-filled, sky-coloured space.
In the aftermath of 1918 people wanted to be charmed, cheered and distracted, not confronted with a fable about life and death operating, as Marguerite said in an attempt to console her father, “on a level altogether more serious, with more depth and nobility.”47 Looking back later, Matisse identified the Rossignol première as the first time the Cubists ganged up on him (“All the people who usually said hello to me turned their backs”).48 Diaghilev, furiously indignant on his designers behalf, blamed the ballets failure on its choreography. Although Matisse made sure the two never worked together again (the impresario died before he could finish testing his theory that, even if the painter refused to collaborate forty-nine times, he would agree on the fiftieth), he would do justice later to Diaghilev’s courage, and his horror of taking the easy way out. Each of them understood only too well the fate of the Chinese Emperor, who loved the true song of the nightingale so much that he pined to death when his courtiers insisted on substituting a more impressive, jewelled and gilded mechanical bird whose song was reliably bland and always the same.
At the time, the Rossignol fiasco was overshadowed by worse catastrophes. On 25 January, a week before the opening, Matisse’s mother died in Bohain. It was exactly fifty years since she and her husband had first opened the seed-store with a section selling paints, where the young Henri had watched his mother weighing out coloured pigment for her customers before mixing it with turpentine and linseed oil. Her love of colour had launched him as a painter, and her support had been unconditional ever afterwards. Matisse was preoccupied with mourning and a sense of mortality intensified that winter by an approaching crisis in his daughters struggle for survival. Marguerite endured constant pain, dizziness, and swellings that blocked the airway and prevented her from speaking as her body successively rejected the rubber or metal contraptions intended to keep her breathing hole open long enough for the reconstructed larynx to stabilise. By the beginning of 1920, she had been waiting under severe and increasing strain since the previous summer for the decision to close the aperture. When her father went back to work in Nice at the end of February, Marguerite hoped against hope that the whole affair might be over before his return. Mother and daughter retreated into themselves, huddled together in the apartment on the quai St-Michel, concealing their worst fears from each other, glossing over their desperation to the outside world, pursued by tart comments about the interminable fuss and the spiralling cost from beady-eyed relations, especially Amélie’s aunt Nine (“I think she sees the figure 6,000 written in the air over my head,” wrote Marguerite who, like her father, could crack jokes even in the jaws of death).49 After endless cat-and-mouse postponements, her surgeon finally performed the operation in late spring, monitoring her even more closely afterwards for fear the larynx might contract yet again.
The year 1920 saw the end of an era for the whole family. Maman Matisse’s house was to be sold, her possessions cleared out and the seed-store given up so that Auguste, always a lacklustre businessman, could retire on the proceeds. Henri Matisse never went back to Bohain, nor to his birthplace of Le Cateau. It was his wife who stayed on to wind up her mother-in-law’s affairs after the funeral, and his daughter who from now on would pay regular visits to oversee the family’s remaining property, deal with lawyers and sign the deed of sale on the house four years later. Matisse would build a new life in the south.
Not that his plans were clearcut at this stage. When he returned alone to the Hotel de la Méditerranée in February, he meant to stay no longer than was necessary to finish off his disrupted season, having already discussed with his wife the possibility of the family moving south at a pinch, if work forced him to come back next year. “Nice gets more and more boring, and I’m alone here when I ought to be with you all—I hope this will be the last time,” he wrote plaintively in March. “I have to remind myself how little I should get done in Paris, so as to get up the patience to stay here.”50 He had persuaded Arnoud to pose for him again, but, although he drove himself to the brink of exhaustion, he was restless, dissatisfied and still unsure what sort of turning point he had reached in his work.51 He said that before he could come home, he needed to make sufficient progress to be clear about the route he was taking.
At the end of April, he posted off seven canvases, all but one so out of character that the family had no idea how to respond (“On arrival, we preferred the figure with a bunch of anemones but then little by little the others, which seemed more lightweight, took on their own existence, and grew stronger,” Marguerite reported cautiously).52 These pretty girls in brightly coloured interiors with frilly curtains and sun pouring through the window mystified even Matisse himself at first. But by the time he left Nice in May, he had recognised an underlying consistency that would continue to elude the rest of the world for decades to come. Among the objects that resurfaced at Issy from his mother’s house in Bohain were the first two pictures he had ever painted, homely little still lifes of books and candles in the earthen colours of the traditional Flemish palette. Far from feeling that his switch to the south marked a total break with the past, Matisse said it gave him the shock of his life when he saw them to realise that after twenty years of unremitting exertion, his essential identity as a painter had not changed in the slightest.53
Marguerite’s recovery was the family priority that summer. As soon as her doctors let her leave Paris, Matisse took his wife and daughter to recuperate in sea air at Etretat in Normandy on the Channel coast. They booked into a beach hotel for a month. Matisse produced rapid oil sketches of exultant vitality, painting the boats, the sea front and the bay with its curious cliff formation that had appealed to so many of his predecessors. “I’ve been at Etretat for two weeks now amid green-topped white cliffs beside a tender blue and turquoise green sea,” he wrote on 20 July to his Nice companion, Jules Romains, “from which I can see emerging superb creamy-white turbots, iron-grey dogfish, lesser spotted dogfish and skate, skate all over the harbour.”54 He bought the pick of the daily catch, paying a boy to water the fish from a bucket as they posed for him, and tipping them back into the sea afterwards.55 The sleek, lithe, powerful creatures in his canvases, thrashing their gleaming tails on beds of seaweed, are as energetic and alert as the painter himself. “They are amazing,” wrote Roger Fry, who saw a batch of these fish pictures on show in October at Bernheim-Jeune. “His certainty and invention are almost uncanny. They’re almost intoxicating to look at.”56
But the canvas that reveals most about Matisse’s feelings at Etretat is a little painting of Marguerite, whose exhaustion was frightening. After living under threat for so long, she allowed herself to collapse at last and be put to bed, where her father painted her for the first time without the black band she had worn since childhood to conceal the opening in her throat. She lies asleep, looking like an illustration from a child’s fairy tale—rounded swan-like neck, long lashes outlined on a pale cheek, dark hair spread on the pillow—in a canvas whose surface sweetness is undercut by the troubling mauve pallor and the dark patches circling the eyes of this real-life sleeping beauty. The artless innocence of
Matisse, Marguerite Asleep, 1920
Pierre Matisse, Portrait of Amélie Matisse, 1921
Portrait of Marguerite Asleep contains the same fierce emotion as the first picture Matisse ever made of his daughter, the 1901 Portrait showing her as a vulnerable six-year-old with staring black eyes in a white face. When they got back to Paris in August, Henri and Amélie hung the new painting over their bed.57
The three of them now set out by car, with Matisse at the wheel, for the ancient spa town of Aix-les-Bains in the Savoy, where the two women were to take the cure while Henri turned back again to complete unfinished business in Normandy. Amélie received a rapturous list of fresh fish—”one lobster, one bass, one codfish, one conger eel, one long blue fish like a mackerel, two oysters and two little skates the size of this sheet of paper”—emerging from the waves to be painted.58 Matisse would visit Etretat once more, alone, out of season the following summer. It was a last return to his roots in northern realism, a confrontation with Courbet in a setting which both had painted, before he committed himself wholly to an unknown future in Nice.
At the end of September 1920, he headed south again, picking up Amélie from Aix and moving with her into roomier quarters on the first floor of the Hotel de la Méditerranée with French windows and a terrace above the bay. She was near collapse herself by this time. “I felt wretched to see her in such a state of misery and fatigue,” Marguerite wrote to her father, “for at bottom I know I’m the cause, involuntary it’s true, but all the same it’s me that got her into this state of fatigue.”59 Mother and daughter were paying the price for two years of mutual strain, fear and deception (“for we couldn’t admit what we were going through, even to each other”).60 Worn out by successive upheavals—coping with the effort and danger of war, dismantling a whole way of life in Bohain, providing Marguerite with intensive care—Amélie sank back into depression.
Marguerite meanwhile was moving slowly and shakily towards full recovery. She was right when she told her son long afterwards that the 1914–18 war had saved her life. Patients who survived serious damage to the breathing mechanism, let alone resumed anything approaching a normal existence, were virtually unheard of in medical history. For her surgeon, Dr. Hautant, this case was a triumph: he called her l’enfant chéri, the precious child, and treated her like a flower in his buttonhole.61 The three young Matisses now took over the apartment on the quai St-Michel. Jean, newly discharged from the army and looking for work, enrolled for a part-time course at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers. Pierre already had his first job (technically still a soldier, having enlisted for a four-year stint rather than wait for conscription, he had been seconded at the end of 1919 to Clemenceau’s private secretariat in Paris). Marguerite took charge of the household, running her brothers as she always had done and beginning at last to catch up with the pleasures of being young in peacetime, dancing, dressing up, going out with the boys and their friends. Fragility made her flame burn more fiercely (“She’s truly the life and soul of the house,” said Jean in an uncharacteristic burst of emotion).62 Over the next few years all three set about painting in earnest, starting out in the same place at the same age to follow in their father’s footsteps.
Family life fell into a regular pattern based on Matisse’s season in Nice, which lasted from early autumn to late spring or early summer interspersed with visits from his children working in Paris, while Amélie shuttled between the two households, and everyone migrated each summer to Issy. Henri was disconsolate each time Amélie left him (“Everyone else is going out to celebrate, and I’m writing to you all before getting off to bed,” was the first line of his letter home on Christmas Eve, 1920). In these first years he signed himself “Henri no news” or “Henri Matisse—le vieux solitaire,” which, as he pointed out to his wife, could mean not only a recluse or hermit but also a lone wild boar.63 Bitterly as he complained about his solitude in Nice, he never seriously reckoned it too high a price to pay for the richness and intensity of the life he was leading on canvas.
Other people, at the time and since, detected frivolity, weakness and backsliding where Matisse saw only a steady push forward, with periods of exploration and experiment followed by consolidation. “As for my work, there’s only one thing I can say,” he told Amélie on New Years Day, 1921, “I’m searching for the density of things—instead of reducing what I see to a silhouette, I’m trying to convey volume and modelling.” He discussed each stage with his wife and children, especially his daughter, whose sharp eye could be counted on to miss nothing. It was Marguerite who pointed out that each phase of strenuous, studious observation paid off in a burst of almost inconceivably audacious colour, which in turn enhanced the luminous subtlety of Matisse’s alternative low-key, brown-and-grey, northern palette; and Marguerite who first grasped that French Window at Nice (one of the batch of paintings that had baffled the family in the spring of 1920) had to do with the power and softness of the light investing the hotel room and everything in it with what J. D. Flam called, more than seventy years later, “an almost gothic splendour.”64 This majestic canvas (colour fig. 20), which shows Arnoud flanked by tied-back grey curtains like pillars at the foot of a tall, blue-shuttered window towering above her like a vault, was known in the Matisse family as “the Cathedral.”
This is perhaps the grandest of the Nice hotel paintings. Where once the windows in Matisse’s pictures opened onto an unattainable world of light and colour, here the sea front glimpsed through the wooden shutters is undeniably real with its palm trees and passers-by. Now it is the interior that has taken on magical qualities. “First, this room was smaller than I had supposed,” wrote Jules Romains’ friend, the poet Charles Vildrac, describing his surprise on meeting Matisse in his makeshift studio at the Méditerranée. “From certain of his pictures, I had formed the impression that you could walk freely in it, with long strides, or dance with ease.” Vildrac felt as if the room, with its tall, round-headed window, its drapes and its clutter of furniture, had not only contracted but dulled over and lost some indefinable grace. “The painter… had lent it a soul that in reality it did not have. Certainly it was a pleasant hotel room, but with the soul of a hotel room.”65
With Arnoud—sometimes solemn, sometimes coquettish, but often bored, listless, even mutinous in these canvases—there was clearly a limit to how far the transformation process could go. For the public, the abstract compositional quality of Matisses paintings at this stage was more or less completely obscured by the lifestyle they depict. French Window at Nice shows a young girl with bare legs and long loose hair, wearing a transparent top and scarlet harem pants, seated beside the bed in the painter’s hotel room. People drew the obvious conclusion from the fact that Matisse posed Arnoud and her two or three substitutes amid all the trappings of an affair, endlessly painting one or other of them wearing a slip at the dressing table, seated in a wrapper over a breakfast tray, or newly emerged from the bath clutching a towel with her hair in a turban. From Conversation onwards, Matisse had painted himself wearing the striped pyjamas that were his normal working gear at home in Issy and in the various hotel rooms that became his studios in Nice. Posterity has confidently discounted the painter’s own statement that these Nice interiors are suffused with sublimated sexual pleasure, and that his intense state of arousal discharged itself not so much through the models body as through the lines and forms orchestrated on cantas around that body66
In Arnoud’s case, the evidence suggests that Matisse’s explanation was true. In all the weekly, sometimes daily, letters he exchanged throughout their collaboration with his wife and children, there is nothing to suggest more than the usual professional tensions on his part, and no hint of friction, resentment or jealousy on theirs. Matisse and his family referred to Arnoud by her surname, and treated her as a work colleague. He painted her for the last time in The Painter and His Model, posting off a sketch to his wife and daughter in triumph the day after the picture was finished, 24 April 1921. In it he shows himself from the back, seated bolt upright at the easel, pyjamaed and bespectacled, in the act of sizing up his composition: an image of concentration, severe and straight as a plumb line, which Matisse had painted before in The Violinist at the Window. The model sprawling naked at his side contributes a note of indifference and anomie to this unsentimental valediction. Arnoud not only had a boyfriend of her own but had been visibly pregnant since the beginning of March, when Marguerite reported her condition to Amélie.67 Later that spring she gave birth to a stillborn baby daughter (“Perhaps just as well,” said Matisse, who knew all about the penalties inflicted on an unmarried mother attempting to keep her child).68 When the two next met two years later, she was working as a fashion vendeuse for the Galeries Lafayette on Nice’s
Matisse, The Painter and His Model, 1921
grand central boulevard, elegant as ever but “still with the same sulky look,” he told Amélie.69
No one who knew him well at the time ever doubted that, for Matisse, models were working partners, not sexual captives. Sex was one of the things he grumbled about having to do without in Nice, quoting his doctor friend Elie Faure, who warned him that excess of chastity could be as much of an abuse as its opposite.70 But Matisse maintained that, so far as modelling went, the same rules applied to human beings as to a plate of pastries or a fish dinner. Pressing your nose up against the cake-shop window makes your saliva run far more than slaking your appetite, he said, remembering his hungry youth. That was why he threw the turbot back into the sea at Etretat, and left his plate of shrimps untouched on the lunch table in Pink Shrimp. “I’ ve never sampled anything edible that had served me as a model, even when posing didn’t affect its freshness,” he said, explaining that the oysters he painted at intervals throughout his life were brought round each morning by a café waiter, who returned to fetch them to serve to his customers at mid-day (“Although I savour their smell, it never occurred to me to have them for lunch—it was others who ate them. Posing had made them different for me from their equivalents on a restaurant table”).71
Arnoud’s place was filled in the spring of 1921 by Henriette Darricarrère, who had been posing intermittently for Matisse for the past six months. He had first noticed her working as a film extra at the newly opened Studios de la Victorine on the western outskirts of Nice, where Charles Pathé and the Gaumont brothers built lots on a site intended at the start of the 1920s to become the European Hollywood. He picked her out initially for her innate dignity, her athlete’s carriage, the graceful way her head sat on her neck.72 Henriette was younger but steadier and less worldly than her predecessor, which meant she fitted in far more easily with the Matisses’ highly unconventional existence. She was a dancer and violinist, a trained musician with natural gifts as a painter, talents Matisse encouraged in her as in his own children.
Amélie got on well with Henriette that autumn, and so did Marguerite when she moved down to Nice at the end of January 1922 for another dose of sea air. The two girls posed together, playing chess, making music, wrapped warmly in Spanish shawls to watch the processions of the Fête des fleurs from the balcony. On sunny days they stood or sat on the grass to be painted under the cherry blossoms in a private park called Liserb, where Matisse had permission to work for a month.73 Henriette’s poise and fluidity, her regular features and oval face, her air of being at ease in her body, added up to a kind of physical perfection that delighted Marguerite, and made her even more determined to get rid of her own invalid status. Henriette for her part looked up to Marguerite, who was six years older and incomparably more sophisticated, but so run-down after a winter in Paris that at first she could only pose lying on a chaise longue, or sitting on the ground out of doors (“I’m incapable of staying upright, it makes me feel I’m being cut into little pieces”).74 Matisse worked them hard, six days a week, two sessions a day with an afternoon nap in between, rewarding them every so often with a drive up into the hills to the viewpoint called La Lanterne, or to the top of Mont Boron to see the sunset gild the sea and bathe the mountains in violet vapour. Once they all three lunched at the Casino and watched a horse race along the beach.
Both parents were still exceedingly anxious about Marguerite, whose physical torpor too often looked like despair. Her father planned a carefully monitored programme of distraction and stimulation. He filled her room with red roses the day she arrived, and hung eleven new paintings on her wall to keep her company when she went to bed straight after dinner. He planned to teach her to drive, and to take her on a round of visits to friends like the Signacs, the young Renoirs at Les Collettes (where Jean had married his father’s model Dédée, who would star in his first films as Catherine Hessling), and the Bussys at Roquebrune, whose house guests that spring included André Gide (“conversation particularly brilliant,” wrote Marguerite, noting that Gide was one of the few French purchasers of Cinquante Dessins).75 Matisse had even taken dancing lessons so that he and his daughter could try out the band at the Casino (“Papa does the foxtrot like his sons,” Marguerite told Amélie, “not quite so light on his feet, but not bad. You can see he’s doing everything to stop me getting bored”).76
Within a few weeks she was eating better, losing the dark smudges under her eyes, looking, to her fathers critical eye, plump, pretty and rested. Marguerite said he was as proud of her regained health and spirits as of any of his own canvases. He took her to a concert in a new dress from Mme Bongard that drew all eyes (“You cant be alone with that frock,” Matisse reported with satisfaction).77 Soon she was strong enough to attend a carnival fancy-dress party at Cagnes hosted by Jean Renoir, who cast himself as an extravagantly decadent Roman to the local police chief’s severe Roman judge. There was a toreador, a Charlie Chaplin, a Japanese in a kimono but, of all the couples who danced till three in the morning, perhaps the most significant, from posterity’s point of view, were the two Matisses, who went as an Arab potentate and a young beauty from the harem. “Papa wore the green-and-gold robe with a turban on his head of gold silk striped in red and green…,” Marguerite wrote home. “As for me, I had loose trousers made from a length of folded stuff, an Algerian muslin top from Ibrahim, the jacket in turquoise blue silk I brought with me, and the white turban.”78
She posed, still drooping with tiredness in her improvised costume, with Henriette bare-breasted in loose red trousers beside her, for a painting called The Arabs, later retitled The Terrace or Odalisque on a Terrace. Matisse had been collecting Oriental bits and pieces—waistcoats, jackets, silk robes, rugs, lamps, trays, a little inlaid table—for years from a Lebanese couple called Ibrahim, who kept a boutique on the rue Royale in Paris. He used them to improvise the kind of settings women endlessly made for themselves in Tangier from rugs, cushions, pieces of stuff and small portable tables or stools. Both Lorette and Antoinette Arnoud had been painted in the white turban before Marguerite. Matisse had sent home for it, along with an Oriental chaise longue and a Persian robe, on his return to Nice after his session in the Ballets Russes’ scene-shop, which seems to have opened his eyes to the potential of costume.79 From then on he experimented enthusiastically with Middle Eastern trousers and tops, Spanish shawls, combs and mantillas, a Venetian robe from the costumier Mme Muelle, and the Bongard outfits designed for his wife and daughter. But none of his earlier models ever made an Oriental costume look like anything but fancy dress. It was Henriette, so neat, even prim, in her street clothes, who wore the filmy open blouses and billowing low-slung pants without inhibition, becoming at once luxuriant, sensual and calmly authoritative.
The Arabs released something in Henriette that opened up new pictorial possibilities for Matisse. Marguerite twice postponed her departure so that he could finish the picture.80 On 7 April, a week before she finally left for Paris, he drove both girls along the coast to try out their costumes in the open air beside the mosque at Antibes. They took the precaution of hiding their exotic outfits under coats, but they needn’t have bothered, since the first thing they saw on entering the simple little fishing village of Cagnes was an Arab caravan with three camels and a film crew.81 La Sultane de l’amour (Love’s Sultaness), shot at Liserb the previous spring, proved to be one of France’s first postwar screen hits, and film-makers rushed to follow it up, erecting Moorish palaces with pools and harems at the Studios de la Victorine for more and more extravagant blockbusters like Rex Ingram’s Garden of Allah and Alexander Wollkoff’s Shéhérezade. Throughout the 1920s, while the silent cinema invented its own powerful daydreams at one end of
Matisse sending his car to Paris by rail, from a letter to his wife, 9 May 1921
the bay of Nice, Matisse was working with similar ingredients, taken from the same sources, on quite different pictorial illusions at the other.
Diaghilev turned up again in mid-April, coming over from the Ballets Russes’ headquarters at Monte Carlo to persuade Matisse to draw Serge Prokofiev for the programme of The Love for Three Oranges. By this time Marguerite had returned to Paris, and Matisse’s plans had been clarified. He accepted Diaghilev’s proposal, driving back specially to Monte Carlo at the end of the month to borrow one of Léon Bakst’s odalisque costumes from the Shéhérezade that had electrified pre-war Paris. It was too tight for Henriette, but the painter had got what he needed (“I saw how it was made, and I could make one like it myself”).82 The season was over and the hotels shutting down, but from now on there was no more talk of Matisse resuming the old routines at Issy. His base had shifted. He said he hoped his wife would stay with him next year, instead of leaving him to fight his battles alone. He found a two-room flat to rent beginning that autumn, sent his car home by rail (sketching himself on his knees with hands raised in prayer as the doughty little Renault was sheeted and roped to its slow goods truck), and followed it himself by fast train on 15 May.
The new flat, on the third floor of 1 Place Charles Félix, was strategically placed at the head of the flower market, below the castle and near the cathedral, in the heart of the old town within a stone’s throw of the sea. For the better part of the next two decades Matisse’s existence outside the studio would be largely confined to an area roughly a mile square, bounded to the east by the rocky outcrop of the castle hill, to the south by the beach with fishing boats drawn up on the stones, and to the north by the art school on the far side of the river Paillon, where washerwomen still worked along the banks. He walked a daily beat between his lodgings in what had once been the senate house, a shabby but imposing eighteenth-century building with plaster mouldings lime-washed in soft ochre, through the market on the Cours Saleya to the Café Pomel under the pink arcades of the Place Masséna.
It was like another country after the late-nineteenth-century new town he had left behind on the promenade des Anglais. As the postwar tide of fashion receded from Nice, its imperial winter pleasure grounds stood empty, its sumptuous palaces, like the Vila Liserb at Cimiez, went on sale, and its seafront hotels began shutting off wings or closing down altogether. “It feels to them as if the end of the world has come,” Matisse said of the staff at the Hotel Méditerranée.83 He encountered the new breed of gamblers, profiteers and speculators only on rare forays to the Casino, where he went to write letters after dinner within earshot of croupiers calling 10,000 francs a throw (“It’s shameful considering the way things are going this year,” wrote Matisse, revolted by the ostentation of the women’s jewels in the harsh climate after the war).84 He felt far more at home, as he always had done, among people whose idea of riches was 100 sous a day (five francs, or roughly twenty cents in American money). The melancholy stagnation of the visitors’ quarter contrasted sharply with the noise and activity on the steep twisting lanes behind his new flat, where the native Niçois lived jammed together in tall old houses with no piped water, sanitation, gas lighting or heating. There were cages of canaries and bedding hung out to air at the windows. Shopkeepers sold chickens, wine, olives and groceries in dark, narrow, windowless hutches opening off the sunlit street like an Arab soukh. Painting was a job like any other to the flower-sellers, fishmongers and café waiters who were Matisse’s neighbours on the market place.
He marked the start of his new life by taking an unprecedented summer break, a leisurely drive south with his wife and daughter. They stopped off at the museum in Grenoble and at Aix, where he sampled the waters before leaving the other two to complete the cure while he drove on to Nice to take possession of the new flat at the end of August 1921. Henriette helped him unpack, and her father took charge of overhauling the car. “I’ve gone back to work after three weeks of laziness,” Matisse announced to Walter Pach. “It’s the first time in thirty years as a painter that such a thing has happened to me.… It’s as if I had never painted before, as if I had to start all over again from the beginning.”85
He had worked for four seasons running in hotels, painting interiors whose decoration he could not alter except by shifting the furniture, introducing jars of flowers and draping lengths of stuff over the tables and chairs. Now he needed an interior he could control and manipulate. The studio Matisse set up at 1 Place Charles Félix, in two rented rooms opening into one another, was organised, quite unlike any previous work space, to enable him to change the scenery as quickly and easily as in a theatre.86 Trunks of props, costumes and backcloths travelled down from Issy by rail. He bought nine yards of cotton material, dyed it himself and lined it with hessian to make a border for a decorative window-grille supplied by Ibrahim.87 One of the first things he did in the new studio was to pose Henriette against it, wearing a turban and harem pants, the long, graceful, curving line of her body accentuated by the window’s rectangular grid.
He found a local carpenter to make him a folding screen from an Arab portière or door curtain, a length of fabric printed with round-headed, lattice-filled archways that would feature in countless paintings over the next few years.88 Henriette posed again and again in front of it, sometimes nude, more often wearing the exotic outfits that suited her so well, standing, sitting or sprawled at full length, alone or with a second model. The Moorish Screen of 1921 (colour fig. 21) combines the stylised patterns of the screen itself, the rug, the carpet and at least two wallpapers with the flowers, the two girls in pale summer frocks and the violin case on the brass bedstead behind them, interweaving colours and shapes in a single flat, patterned surface contiguous with the canvas itself. This was the fusion between realism and abstraction Matisse had proposed two years earlier to Ragnar Hoppe, a fusion that retained its subjects’ identity while at the same time absorbing them within an essentially abstract and wholly imaginary alternative reality.89
Matisse’s apartment opened out on canvas, expanding or contracting as if by magic, like theatrical or cinematic space. In it he could adjust his gaze like a tracking camera, switching filters, plunging from long to close focus, creating colour and light effects that correspond less to anything in front of him than to an invisible synthesis in his mind’s eye. These unreal interiors matched the essential theatricality of Nice, a city where décor had been more important than architecture from the eighteenth century onwards, and where the 1920s saw the invention of an entirely new medium based on unreality. Matisse, along with the rest of the inhabitants,
Matisse, sketch of a film sequence being shot outside the Nice Casino
got used to coming across a caravanserai of sheikhs on location, or a freak rainstorm laid on by local firemen with hoses. Once he stayed out until one in the morning watching a film crew at work outside the floodlit casino, sketching the scene for his wife afterwards as a graphic linear ballet of arches, pillars and firemen’s ladders criss-crossed by shafts of rain, with scurrying stick figures below, the entire maneouvre controlled through a megaphone by the director. “This interested me greatly,” wrote Matisse.90
He recruited models at the film studios, or the café on Place Masséna where extras collected each morning in search of work. Like the silent cinema, he borrowed the make-believe settings of French painterly orientalising for ends of his own. Contemporaries who accused Matisse of slipping back into reactionary mode missed the point. So do posthumous, art-historical charges of colonial exploitation, since Matisse, like the popular cinema, positively emphasised the fact that his odalisques, with their up-to-date hair-dos and frank body language, come neither from North Africa nor the Middle East but from contemporary France. Their blatant modernity intensifies the erotic charge that distracts attention, as Matisse said himself, from other, less obvious explorations going on in the same canvas.
Chief of these was his attempt to make colour create light by exploiting what he called a thirst for rhythmic abstraction.91 To do this he consulted predominantly two disparate sources. For at least six years after Renoirs death, Matisse continued to visit Les Collettes to paint in the garden and go through the canvases in the studio (“I examined Renoir’s paintings at leisure, and it helped me a lot”).92 Perhaps he took specific tips from the Impressionist’s firm, rounded models in filmy blouses, or the Parisian women who dressed up for him as Algerian odalisques round about 1870, but what seems to have interested Matisse more than either was the way Renoir abolished the distinction between figures and background, merging the two in great surging waves of colour on canvases that hum and glow with sensuality. Matisse accompanied this chromatic crash course with structural tuition from Michelangelo, visiting the plaster casts from the Medici Chapel at the art school, and getting Pierre to order him a cast of Dying Slave from the Louvre.93 In the late spring of 1922, Matisse spent mornings painting Henriette and afternoons drawing Michelangelo’s Night (“This drawing marks real progress in my study of form, and I hope that tomorrow my painting will feel the benefit”).94
Matisse said that what mattered with each new model was finding the pose that made her most comfortable (“and then I become the slave of that pose”).95 Henriette, who had trained as a ballet dancer, had an athletic body quite unlike Antoinette’s. Marguerite maintained that the main reason her father switched models was the contrast between Antoinette’s soft curves (“Antoinette was flabby, and her body did not catch the light”) and Henriette’s lithe, well-developed figure, which took and gave back light like a sculpture.96 Henriette fell easily into Michelangelo’s poses, relaxing quite naturally on a couch or armchair with one leg drawn up and one or both arms raised over her head. In the seven years they worked together, Matisse multiplied variations on the same theme with ferocious audacity in paintings, drawings and prints which use straight lines (as Michelangelo used architectural detail) to offset the roundness of belly and breast against window frames, screen edges, hanging panels, the angle between wall and floor.
The model stares back in moods which range from quizzical or sombre composure to almost feral abandon or the tough, masklike impassivity of the astonishing Moorish Woman or Seated Odalisque with a Raised Knee. Few would identify Michelangelo’s muscular nudes as an obvious source for this big-breasted, soft-bellied houri in a transparent skirt, with rouged nipples and a fake tattoo on her forehead. Now as then, many may well feel too bemused to look closely at the exquisitely observed and miraculously painted texture of her body and legs, set against pink striped upholstery, seen through embroidered silk gauze, and outlined with flicks of turquoise green which stabilize the composition, establishing what Matisse called its architectural underpinning, interacting with the turquoise turban and the purples and pinky mauves of the floral back-cloth in a pulsing, shimmering framework of colour.
The process drove him to black gulfs of despair, when his work revolted him and he longed to destroy it. “You know the state,” Amélie wrote to Marguerite after putting up with one of these moods for three days on end.97 Matisse, never easy to live with, could be almost unbearable at close quarters in two cramped rooms, when his wife could do nothing but tidy the studio with him buzzing round her like an angry fly, or sawing away as loud as he could on his violin. Amélie’s visits in these years were constantly promised, and constantly postponed or cut short on account of Marguerite’s health or her own. She would arrive from Paris, often preoccupied with troubles she had left behind, to find him obsessed by whichever big nude was currently demanding all he had to give (“The big nude, after surviving various tragic periods, has regained its serenity, and I tremble to see it change,” Amélie reported tartly. “If ever I had any say, I’d make sure it stays as is, for I like it a lot”).98 Work now claimed him so insistently that the life his wife represented outside it came to seem less and less real. He had left her to cope with his family’s affairs in Bohain after his mother’s death, and when her father died suddenly in Ajaccio in November 1922, Matisse could not tear himself away from the studio even for a few days to attend the funeral. He longed for news, begged for visits, missed his wife desperately. But his schemes for returning to Paris in mid-season to see the family and catch up with one or other of his annual one-man shows at Bernheim-Jeune invariably fell through.
In the end he missed five of these shows in a row. The paintings he sent back to Paris—-mostly fruit, flowers and nudes in cushioned and carpeted interiors—gave an impression of ease and comfort that conditioned the way people looked at Matisse’s work ever afterwards (cf. Nude with Goldfish, colour fig. 22). But, to the painter himself, this fresh start in Nice felt like a more inhuman version of his harsh beginnings as a student thirty years earlier. The more generous painting’s rewards, the bleaker his existence became out of working hours. He bought himself a pair of goldfish for company and painted all day, with reluctant stops for a frugal lunch of cold ham or hard-boiled eggs and a solitary dinner at a teashop or café followed by a nightly session of letter-writing. Cold weather set in hard in his first winter in the Place Charles Félix, with two feet of snow on the ground by early December. Matisse bought wooden sabots, wrote
Matisse wearing the winter nightcap in which even his goldfish didn’t recognise him
home for blankets and an overcoat, and froze at night when he had to let his stove go out for fear of poisoning the model next morning with a build-up of noxious fumes.
If his paintings occupied a space and time of their own, so did he. When the nations clocks were put back an hour to save winter daylight, Matisse confessed that he found out only twenty-four hours after everyone else. Most years he barely noticed Christmas (“For me it was a day like any other”),99 and paid scant attention to his own birthday a week later (“In twenty-four hours I’m going to be fifty-two,” he wrote in an agitated postscript to Marguerite on 30 December 1921, “fifty-two already!!!!”). Occasionally he took time off for one of the Renoirs’ New Year’s Eve parties, but mostly he wrote letters after supper as usual before going early to bed. One cold winter’s night he sketched himself looking like an off-duty magician in a striped, woolly dressing gown and checked carpet slippers, with a pot of tea on the table, spectacles propped on his nose and an absurd, sausage-shaped, rabbit-skin nightcap on his head in which, as he said, even his goldfish didn’t recognise him.100
The few friends Matisse saw intermittently were all in one way or another fugitives like himself: Romains, who had been a dashing young professor of philosophy at the boys’ lycée in wartime, and returned regularly afterwards as an increasingly successful writer; various other Parisians for whom Nice provided a refuge or hideout, like Félix Roux and Gaston Modot; painters including Bussy, Bonnard, the young André Marchand and Charles Thorndike, a hospitable American who built a villa for himself, his Breton wife and his sea-captain stepson on the far side of the old port. Occasional dinner invitations from friends’ wives provided Matisse’s only female company outside the studio. Living alone for long stretches for the first time in his life, he put himself on a strict regime. A late riser who loved food and seldom took exercise outside the studio, Matisse in his early fifties reversed the habits of a lifetime by forcing himself to rise at six, swim before breakfast and cut back on his lunches. In the same precautionary mode, he even accompanied Thorndike to the brothels he had so stubbornly resisted with Marquet (“They’re not much fun, to be frank, and always the same”).101 He told Lydia Delectorskaya long afterwards that he patronised them throughout the years Henriette modelled for him, fitting them in dutifully and without enthusiasm (“Tiens, I forgot to go to the brothel again”),102 in the pragmatic French spirit that treats sex without the rituals of courtship or chase as a bodily function no more romantic than any other. It was at this point that Matisse recommended abstinence to Romains (himself about to split up with one wife and take another), who responded with baffled respect.103
For Henriette, too, Matisse’s schedule was gruelling. She worked with him all day every day except Sunday, shut up in the studio apart from a two-hour lunch break when the whole town closed down at mid-day (“She cant even go shopping,” Matisse said ruefully).104 Studio chores like running errands, washing brushes and making the tea were part of her routine. It was a kind of bondage, but it was also an apprenticeship. Matisse opened doors that would otherwise have remained firmly closed to an aspiring young female artist denied access to books or painting by a limited education (“She’s afraid to send you a letter, not knowing how to write properly,” he told Marguerite)105 that had been broken off early in the interests of earning a living. Henriette’s parents were working people from the north, and proud of it. Like Arnoud, she had a lover, an educated, middle-class boy with whom she had already been walking out for twelve months before coming to work for Matisse. She successfully concealed the affair from her parents, who were outraged when they found out after three years, not so much by her having a lover as by his bourgeois origins (“They had hoped to marry her off to a good working boy,” Matisse reported to his wife, who, like himself, was touched by both Henriette and her family).106
The Matisses regularly took her with them for drives, or to see the opera at Monte Carlo. Henriette accompanied Amélie on shopping trips, and outings to the mountain resort of Peira-Calva. Marguerite sent her parcels of clothes, the boys asked after her in their letters, and Matisse practised duets with her when the day’s work had gone well. On his return to the Hotel de la Méditerranée to paint the carnival procession each spring, he invited Henriette with her mother and her two little brothers to watch the fireworks from his window. When she fell ill, he took her to consult a doctor for the first time in her life. Born in 1901, a year younger than Pierre Matisse, Henriette became in some ways a substitute daughter for the Matisses as their own children prepared to leave home. She responded to their warmth as eagerly as to the opportunities they offered. “Oh! It’s so nice to see a happy family like yours,” she told Marguerite in 1923.107 By this time the flat that was to have provided the Matisses with a home of their own in Nice had been entirely taken over by the studio, and the painter and his wife were living out of suitcases again in a modest hotel round the corner.
Painting as always remained the pivot on which the family turned. Matisse’s canvases consoled his daughter in sickness, and roused his wife from depression when nothing else could. Once he posted her a picture at
Marguerite Matisse, sketch of Matisse’s latest work hung alongside Cézannes and Renoirs in the family salon at Issy with a snapshot of her father tucked into the mirror at Easter, 1923
Jean’s suggestion, and Pierre, who had gone off to work in the morning leaving his mother ill in bed, came home to find her singing to herself (“I’ve been sent something!!! I’ve been sent something!!!”), dancing round the room to the gramophone. “The little picture, which is a real gem and Mamans delight, has cured her completely,” Pierre reported to his father. “She’s getting more and more impatient every day for your return.”108 The arrival of a crate of new canvases, sent up from Nice each spring in time for Matisse’s show at Bernheim-Jeune, caused wild excitement at Issy. “We often picture the scene…,” Amélie wrote to Marguerite from Nice in 1921, “with that little devil Pierre capering about in the middle, and you and Jean trying to quiet him down.” The year after, the tension was even greater, only this time it was Amélie who jumped every time the bell rang and had to be calmed by her children.109
The annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. “I feel this evening as if I’d had three solid hours of music,” Marguerite wrote after one of these sessions. “I’m drunk with it, and can’t either look or judge any more.”110 The family’s private picture shows, lasting at most a few days before the dealers arrived to take their pick, became the high point of the year. If Matisse was increasingly absent in person, a sense of his presence now filled the whole house. In 1923 Marguerite made a diagram of the spring hang for her father, showing his latest painting of Henriette flanked on one side by Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and on the other by Renoir’s Alphonsine, with more Renoirs, Cézannes and Matisses alternating two deep on the long wall of the salon, and a snapshot of Papa tucked into the frame of the mirror over the fireplace.111 This was the cause and purpose of his sequestration in Nice. “There’s nothing to be done but to live in and for yourself—to work towards becoming a real force that can’t be dismissed,” he wrote, when his wife and daughter complained about the slights of the art world, and the strain his absence imposed, “—today you’re a great genius—tomorrow they’ll despise you—It’s only natural.… We have a genuine collection of pictures—I’m working with the courage of independence, my pictures have a market value etc, I’ve quite a reputation even with those who know nothing of painting.… We are one of those rare large families whose members live in unity—don’t you think that’s enough to make people envious and jealous?”112
