Matisse in the studio at Cimiez
People who visited Matisse in Vence after the war commonly reported two successive surprises. The first was to find him living in such a boxlike little house: the Villa le Rêve was so plain and unassuming that Picasso initially knocked at the door of a more picturesque place further up the road, and had to be escorted back by a neighbour to the right front gate.1 The second surprise was stepping over the threshold from the sunlit garden into a pitch-black entrance hall. “We entered one room and then another,” wrote Françoise Gilot, describing her own first visit to the villa with Picasso. “All shutters were closed, and everything stood in obscurity. As our eyes accommodated to the darkness, the objects gradually emerged from the shadows.”2 In one room light filtered dimly through the tracery of a moucharabieh, or Arab screen. White doves flew freely in another. Pots, plants, ornaments and oranges scattered on chairs or tables appeared to come to life, and to be even more alive in the still lifes hanging behind them in the gloaming. “A date tree swinging its palms in the garden outside was framed by the window’s colourful Tahitian curtains, and repeated, larger than life, on the wall, as if the strength of this painting allowed reality to become a mere reflection.”
Gilot was not the only one who came to think of Matisse in these years as a magician, expanding or contracting space at will (“Space has the boundaries of my imagination,” he said simply when asked to define its limitations).3 Many people felt in his studios at Vence or Cimiez as if they had entered another world, or crossed into a different dimension of the one they knew. Aragon, in a characteristically baroque extended metaphor, compared himself to a hero from Italian romance lost in the enchanter’s garden, entranced, disorientated and increasingly aware of being an alien intruder in this strangely ordered universe, “like a man who penetrates the consciousness of another and, without grasping its law, divines its singular coherence.”4 Matisse, who said that every drawing or painting was a morsel of himself, seemed in the closing decade of his life to have turned even his physical environment into an extension of his own way of seeing.5 It was the final stage of a trick he had first performed in Moscow before the First World War, when the exuberant pinks and greens of Shchukin’s drawing room were somehow absorbed into the more powerful reality projected by the twenty or thirty canvases hanging on the walls.
Matisse was operating literally as well as metaphysically on the borders of perception. “I’m out of action because of having flirted for too long, more or less nonstop, with these enchanted colours,” he had written to André Rouveyre at the end of 1943, when the paper cut-outs he made for Jazz brought his lifelong confrontation with colour to a climax.6 His Nice oculist (who had treated Monet in his last years in Paris) explained that the eye could not fabricate pigment fast enough to keep up with the speed and intensity of Matisse’s response to colour. The painter said he had achieved the same intensity before without being able to sustain it, like a juggler throwing his clubs so high he couldn’t catch them (“I was perfectly capable of pinning down on canvas the colours that give me relief… but I had no way of keeping them at that pitch”).7 Now he cut or carved directly into colour, using scissors and sheets of painted paper, working all day and much of the night, covering his walls with a display of unprecedented brilliance and fluidity. “He lived in and for it.” said Lydia. Warnings that this kind of strain might permanently damage his sight could no more stop him than his father’s insistence that he would starve had prevented him from becoming a painter in the first place. Matisse lived in darkened rooms, and even took a kind of pride in the fact that his eyes required protection from his latest work.
At the beginning of 1945, he told his daughter he had gone as far as he could with oil painting. From now on he meant to concentrate on larger decorative projects beyond the scope of conventional spatial or conceptual constraints: “Paintings seem to be finished for me now .… I’m for decoration—there I give everything I can—I put into it all the acquisitions of my life. In pictures, I can only go back over the same ground… but in design and decoration, I have the mastery, I’m sure of it.”8 He felt the same surge of energy he had experienced as a boy when he held his first paint-box in his hands. Now as then he had no time to lose. “I asked my doctors in Lyon for three years’ respite in order to bring my work to a conclusion—that was four years ago, and there are still things I haven’t said.” This was the last great liberation of his life. He plunged headlong—”without thought, especially without afterthought”9—into a new world of decoration whose patterns corresponded to the inner movements of his mind. Its infinite possibilities embraced both strength and weakness (or rather, as he said, eliminated conscious distinctions between the two). Its rhythms freed him at last from the inhibitions of the will. Spontaneity was its greatest gift.
“When we arrived we found Matisse armed with a huge pair of scissors, carving boldly into sheets of paper painted in all kinds of bright colours,” wrote Gilot, describing another of her visits to the villa with Picasso, when their host sat up in bed holding the paper delicately in his left hand, winding and turning it beneath the blades in his right, which released a steady stream of cut-outs dropping onto the coverlet below.10 “There is nothing to resist the passage of the scissors,” said Annelies Nelck, “nothing to demand the concentrated attention of painting or drawing, there are no juxtapositions or borders to be borne in mind. And the little creatures extracted from their element fall from the scissors in quivering spirals, and subside like those fragile organisms the sea leaves washed up on the sand.”11 Matisse worked without fumbling or hesitation, comparing himself repeatedly in these years to an acrobat or juggler. Mind, hand and eye flowed effortlessly together (“Its like a dance,” he said).12 People who watched him found themselves almost hypnotised by his gliding fingers. Once, Gilot and Picasso brought a real magician to Matisse’s bedside as a tribute. Matisse returned the compliment by making abstract portraits of them both, one after the other, cutting out shapes, then sorting, selecting and fitting them together on a coloured ground, “until finally the entire assemblage started to interact and bloom,” ready to be pinned in place by Lydia. “We were spellbound, in a state of suspended breathing…,” wrote Gilot, describing a performance that reduced Picasso to stunned silence. “We sat there like stones, slowly emerging from a trance.”13
Every barrier Matisse had broken through in the past had cost him fearful pain and labour. In his seventieth year, he said, he still felt the urge to strangle someone before he could begin to paint, and likened the act itself to slitting an abscess with a penknife.14 It was only when shape and colour began to interest him to the exclusion of all else that he started experimenting with speedy new techniques—scissors-and-paper, linocuts, children’s colouring crayons—all aimed at eliminating friction. “I would say its the graphic, linear equivalent of the sensation of flight,” he said of his cut-paper work, explaining that scissors in his hands became as sensitive as pens, pencils or charcoal sticks (“perhaps even more so”).15 Drawing with scissors effectively abolished the frontiers between thought, feeling and expression. It allowed him to concentrate on overall effect rather than component parts, a knack perfected in more traditional ways of drawing where he no longer worried about inessentials, “any more than a juggler in action thinks about rain or tobacco or beer as his umbrella, his pack of cigarette papers and his beer mug spin through his fingers.”16 The new technique capitalised on the elasticity and confidence acquired initially from etching, and developed in the illustrated books, which came out at intervals after the war: Les Fleurs du mal in 1947, the sumptuously simple Florilèges des amours de Ronsard in 1948 and Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans in 1950. All of them caused misery to editors, printers and their workmen, who learned to dread Matisse’s fastidious and exacting supervision as much as they’relished the phenomenal boldness and precision of his hand in action. Drawing on highly polished copper plates, swerving and swooping over a surface less resistant than drawing-paper (which swallows the ink and slows the pen), produced a crisp, decisive, calligraphic style that flowed directly into the breathtaking condensations and abbreviations of his large-scale late work in cut-paper.17
A wall of cut-outs in the studio at Vence
At the time, Matisse said he had no specific aim in mind when he covered the walls of his studio with coloured cut-outs. In retrospect, he came to look back on the years of solitude and wartime privation in Vence as a period of preparation, the equivalent of a musician practising scales and exercises, or an acrobat rehearsing balancing techniques before walking out on the high wire.18 He said he had been mistaken all his life in measuring the significance of any given work by the struggles that went into it.19 In his mid-seventies he felt himself approaching the clarity, power and purpose evoked by Paul Valéry in a passage Camoin copied out for Matisse at the end of 1945: “Perhaps what we call perfection in art… is no more than the sense of wanting or finding in a human work that certainty of execution, that inner necessity, that indissoluble, reciprocal union between design and matter, which I find in the humblest seashell.”20
Matisse had come as close as he ever would to dissolving the demarcation lines between art and life. “Everything was for his work,” said Lydia. “He ate sparingly so as not to have problems with digestion, he took a siesta in order to be rested for the next work session, he hired a night nurse in hopes of claiming as many hours’ sleep as possible.” The process of dissolution was simplified by Lydia, who defined her role of secretary in the same generous terms as her compatriot Diaghilev (“A secretary must know how to make himself indispensable,” said Diaghilev, outlining the services he required from any youth taken on in this capacity).21 Matisse’s visitors never tired of speculating about Lydia’s status—”she gave the impression of a slave, a very beautiful slave”22—and the precise functions she performed. But her air of Oriental mystery concealed impressive, if unconventional, administrative talent. She typed, kept records, paid bills and drew up meticulous accounts, organised Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with steely efficiency. Her will was indomitable, and her exploits legendary. One summer’s day in 1945, Lydia set out to dispatch an urgent package to a publisher in Paris only to find rail services unexpectedly disrupted in Vence, so she raced down the mountain on foot, walking fifteen miles in broiling heat before picking up a local train further along the line in time to reach Nice and deliver her packet to the guard of the Paris express with seconds to spare.23 Matisse kept up a running joke with Rouveyre about Lydia’s real and imagined capacities in all departments, whether it was solving problems of logistics, subduing resistance from unruly editors and dealers, or simply piloting an aeroplane (“It would surprise me if she didn’t know how to fly one”).24 He claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence. Lydia for her part never modified or withdrew her allegiance to Matisse, who had given her life a purpose, and trained her to fulfil it. “Without insisting or explaining anything, he made me useful,” she said, “and little by little, I became even more useful than he’d hoped.”
Matisse left a graphic record of her progress in two very different portraits. The first—Young Woman in Blue Blouse, a tiny canvas gleaming with springlike gaiety and freshness, painted at the outset of their alliance in the autumn of 1939—shows Lydia with straight nose, pink cheeks and yellow hair in a dove-blue dress, looking childishly neat and simple, even prim, but upright and centred like the plumb line. “I was a dimwit in those days,” she said long afterwards, “totally ignorant of anything to do with painting.” In 1947, Matisse reviewed their partnership again, painting her this time with deep green hair and clearcut, authoritative features sharply divided by geometrical zones of blue and yellow in what he called the Bicoloured Portrait. “I had changed during those years,” said Lydia. “Responsibility made me like that. I felt my personality completely altered. Before I was shy and inward looking. But it was necessary for me to go into action, to see to everything, to give orders.”25 Lydia had acquired very nearly mythical status by this time in the envious eyes of other painters. She washed Matisse’s brushes, cleaned his palette, pinned his flimsy paper shapes in place with a deftness and accuracy even he could not fault. Her prowess in the studio was matched by her reputation as the dragon guarding his privacy against encroachment from the outside world. She kept track of appointments, dealt with workmen and suppliers, engaged and managed models and assistants in the atmosphere of disciplined tranquillity that struck everyone who visited his studio. All these routines were first established on a solid footing in the years of wartime seclusion that she and Matisse spent together at Cimiez and Vence.
Matisse, Young Woman in Blue Blouse (Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya), 1939: “I was a dimwit in those days, totally ignorant of anything to do with painting.”
The two encountered them daily at this time—André Rouveyre and Annelies Nelck—both thought of Matisse and Lydia as a single unit. Rouveyre, who relied implicitly on Lydia’s artistic as well as practical judgement, said he found it hard to see them as separate entities. To Nelck, who had turned up in desperation on their doorstep, they showed a concerted front of tolerance, kindness and concern. “I was a child, in a catastrophic state when I came to them, and instead of throwing me out, they gave me, both in their different ways, the most precious thing they had: their time and their attention.”27 She was by her own account ill, poor, malnourished, unstable, at times almost frantic with misery and foreboding. All she knew about Matisse at that stage was that local people said he was a painter. Between them he and Lydia slowly calmed her perturbed and angry spirit (“What is so marvellous about these two,” she told her diary in 1944, “is that they understand everything without ever passing judgement”).28
Matisse, Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, 1947: “I had changed .… Before, I was shy and inward-looking. But then I had to go into action, to see to everything, to give orders.”
Over the next six years Nelck became for all practical purposes an adopted daughter of the house, posing, running errands and helping Lydia in the studio. Matisse took charge of her education as a painter, gave her employment as a model, found buyers for her work (“I told them your usual price was 1,000 francs for a portrait”), and presented her with occasional drawings of his own (“so that, in case you ever need it, you have a little reserve to dip into,” Lydia explained). Nelck said he taught her as much about order and balance in her life as in her painting. Her testimony as to how he and Lydia functioned in private as a couple remains unique. Like Aragon, she saw their exclusive absorption in Matisse’s work as a form of defiance, a stubborn joint refusal to be outfaced by potentially disastrous odds. “I was a witness of the daily unobtrusive exercise of heroism and virtue, and I could recognise its results,” she wrote, describing an ascetic regime stripped of superfluous social or domestic content, permanently attuned only to Matisse’s needs as an artist.29
He and his doctors knew well enough that in the last resort his life depended on Lydia. He had no illusions about his own chances of survival as he watched his friends claimed one after another in the next few years by infirmity and death. The first to leave was Aristide Maillol. “He ranked senior to us all and now he’s gone…,” Matisse reported in one of his first letters to Pierre after the liberation. “I hope his lieutenants will have better luck—they’re rather shaky, but I hope they’ll hold the fort for a bit. You know who I mean by the lieutenants—there’s Bonnard, who’s seventy-nine and can still get about… then there’s me, hoping with minute care to keep going a while longer.”30 Bonnard survived the war, largely thanks to the attentions of Aimé Maeght, who had set up a kind of one-man emergency supply service for artists from an unpretentious picture shop on the Cannes sea front (“Did you notice his canvases?” Matisse asked shrewdly, when Nelck returned from delivering a message to Maeght’s house in Vence. “He may well be going to turn into a great picture dealer”).31 The rest of Matisse’s little band of companions along the coast—Rouveyre, Bussy, Camoin at St-Tropez—remained intact, if depleted and less mobile than before.
But Berthe Parayre, who had sworn to live long enough to see France liberated, lay dying from cancer at Beauzelle that spring. “Berthe, poor Berthe, ending her life so unjustly after a life entirely given to others,” Matisse wrote to Pierre, who reached France just too late to see his aunt alive.32 She died on 4 June 1945, a month after the German armies surrendered unconditionally in Europe. Amélie spent the final weeks at her sister’s side. In the six years since Matisse had last seen his wife, their roles had been dramatically reversed. Whereas he would spend the rest of his life more or less bedridden, she had regained the fighting spirit of her buccaneering Parayre forebears, sailing through the ordeals of arrest, interrogation and incarceration, emerging with aplomb in excellent health to face a prosperous old age surrounded by the pictures which, as she firmly reminded her husband, had been at the core of her life as well as his.33
In the spring of 1945, Matisse’s oldest friend, Léon Vassaux, came to stay with him in Vence, looking unrecognisably bent, frail and worn. Dr. Vassaux had grown up with the painter and had been his first collector, owning half a dozen luminous little landscapes and still lifes from the 1890s, all of which he had been forced to sell except the last (“Its kept you company all your life,” Matisse said encouragingly, proposing to find his friend a buyer, “and now it can help you through old age”).34 The two reverted to an easy, companionable intimacy, exchanging news, relaxing over good food, wine and music, capping one another’s stories of their Bohain boyhood and their student escapades on the Left Bank. They sampled the hearty onion soup and sipped the strangely flavoured nips of neat spirit peculiar to their native North, carefully prepared and served to them by Lydia. She said Vassaux released a side of Matisse—buoyant, jokey, uninhibited—he showed no one else. The doctor gave his host a check-up (“I’ve never come across an invalid looked after with anything like such understanding”).35 But Matisse was shocked by the dilapidation of the childhood comrade who had sheltered him at intervals for forty years and more, providing a haven of unchanging calm in the painter’s long career of turmoil, panic and upheaval. Now it was the other way about. Vassaux remained as perceptive, humorous and kind as ever, but the pressures of his respectable, well-regulated life as a country doctor had crushed his capacity for renewal. Memories of their youth provided temporary refuge from an overwhelming sense of inertia. “I would like to think that energy and courage are contagious,” Vassaux wrote sadly to Matisse. “I’m a little younger than you are but of the two of us, its me that’s aged, which is as it should be, because of the two you alone still have a goal in view, an ideal, and what an ideal!”36
The second time Vassaux came to stay, he brought with him Matisse’s first sculpture, a clay medallion of the girl they had both loved as students more than half a century before.37 Camille Joblaud, Marguerite’s mother, was now also in her seventies, married to a retired schoolmaster in Brittany, and sustained in old age by the golden recollected glow of her short reign as the toast of the artists’ quarter in bohemian Paris. Matisse, who sent money and received news of her from time to time through their daughter, hung her plaster portrait on his wall in valediction. His thoughts ran on lives he might have led, prompted by a passage from Gérard de Nerval about the suicide of a beloved friend, which he copied out and decorated.38 He told Lydia it reminded him of Olga Meerson, another beautiful Russian who had loved him dearly, who had killed herself in Berlin under Nazi rule, and whose death he now commemorated in cyclamen-pink ink with a wreath of blue-ink ribbon.
Over the next few years, the sculpted profile of Camille would appear and reappear in a final astonishing set of variations on a theme first painted in her living presence, the studio interior. These canvases—Red Interior, Still Life on a Blue Table, Still Life with Pomegranates and Still Life with Pomegranates on a Ground of Venetian Red, all produced in 1947—incorporate the claims of the past without nostalgia or false sentiment in the patterns of the present. They belong to a group of nearly thirty views of the studio at Vence, the last pictures Matisse ever painted, which project light and colour with a vitality so intense it seems almost independent of its physical origins. They look forward to new forms of pictorial abstraction, and at the same time they’recapitulate a mood of inner contemplation that goes back to Matisse’s earliest work, a Proustian sense of time, telescopic and infinitely adjustable, like space.
Matisse, Red Interior, Still Life on a Blue Table, 1947, showing the clay medallion of Camille Joblaud hanging on the wall of the Vence studio
On 3 July 1945, Matisse returned to Paris, travelling by sleeper on the train with ambulances laid on at either end, to prepare for the joys and strains of a complicated family reunion. Jean had settled at Issy, working in his father’s garden studio and living with his family in the town. Marguerite was installed in her apartment on the rue de Miromesnil that summer, awaiting the return of both her husband and her son from wartime exile in New York. Amélie had moved back into Marguerites spare room again to lend support. Pierre was the first to reach France, flying in at the end of July to resume in person the extraordinary postal conversation with his father, interrupted in the past six years only by Matisse’s operation and the blockade of the Atlantic.
Throughout the public and private dramas of the war, Matisse had articulated his hopes, doubts and fears in weekly letters of up to twenty pages, written on both sides of transparent airmail paper, sometimes with extra lines crammed in at right angles across the top of the original message, as if he could scarcely bear to break contact with Pierre. The letters convey on both sides a depth and tenderness of feeling neither party could find words for face-to-face. Father and son alternated roles, offering one another sound advice and sensitive consolation, occasionally enlivening their civilised exchange with tirades of Racinean fury or reproach, in a correspondence that combines a diary’s scope and freedom with the frankness of the confessional. Like the confessional, it would retain its secrets to the end of both their lifetimes. In public, Matisse’s treatment of his son was often wounding or dismissive. Pierre grumbled loud and long about his father. Neither family nor friends suspected the hidden side of a relationship increasingly poisoned on the surface, as postwar prices rose and stocks of paintings dwindled, by Matisse’s ingrained mistrust of the dealers’ trade.
Terms had to be renegotiated all round in the summer of 1945, as the family slowly adjusted to new positions at the margin of Matisse’s life and work. He himself was wary and on edge. This was the first time since the official separation from his wife that he had confronted the outside world with “Madame Lydia” at his side. They settled into the family apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse with a night nurse and the cook from Vence, but although neither studio nor household could function without her, Lydia’s position was painfully equivocal. No one knew what to call her, how to treat her, whether or not to take seriously a secretary who combined the role of chief executive with the duties of model, nurse, companion, studio aide and office dogsbody. Male visitors reestablishing official links with Matisse after the war were intrigued by her virtually invisible presence in his apartment. Married couples could not receive her, and her professional credentials would take years to establish with the Paris art world. Lydia set no store by social life, but even business contacts made privacy impossible, since Matisse scheduled appointments at home and ran his affairs through her.
“I’m going to try to isolate myself by behaving as if I were still absent,” Matisse had announced before he even reached the capital, but his hopes were dashed by a regular tide of journalists, government envoys, exhibition organisers, dealers and curators washing through the apartment every afternoon.39 “Paris is hell,” he wrote after a fortnight to Rouveyre.40 Publishers and the dentist took up such time as he had left (“If you knew what I’ve been through, you’d have toothache yourself”). After a month, he caught bronchitis. Exhaustion was compounded by official attempts to requisition his apartment, and by a failure of the heating system in the vaults of the Banque de France that disastrously affected the work in storage. The ten weeks or so initially set aside for Paris lengthened to a stay of four months, much of it spent assessing damage, relining canvases and drying out hundreds of waterlogged, often mildewed etchings.41 Matisse lurked in his room as if it were a hole or cave, rarely leaving the apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first colour film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation), or trips to a shooting booth on the boulevard Montparnasse, where he and Lydia hired rifles to relieve their feelings.
Marguerite had warned her father about the campaign of persecution and denunciation raging in liberated Paris against anyone accused, with or without reason, of having collaborated with the German occupiers.42 Fabiani was arrested, and Albert Skira was refused permission to reenter France. Matisse himself would eventually be forced to drop a scheme to erect a memorial in the Midi to Maillol,43 whose name had been tainted by the Vichy regime’s attempt to rebrand him as France’s equivalent to the Nazis’ “sculptor of the future,” Arno Breker. The mindless virulence of these witch-hunts dismayed Matisse at the time and afterwards. “I don’t see what good my protests would do,” he said when Mme Marquet urged him to speak out against the infamous wartime delegation headed by Derain and Vlaminck. “You know that those who went to Germany were driven to it by a kind of fright, and they’ve already suffered for it.”44 Political involvement was not in Matisse’s nature, but neither would he criticise Picasso, whose public pronouncements had made him the popular embodiment of the liberty and patriotic pride—la Gloire—in whose name so many excesses were committed. “I don’t think like him,” Matisse explained to his daughter, who had endured too much real suffering to be impressed by Picasso’s posturing, “but its difficult for me to judge him—he has let himself get caught up in it like Zola before him, and Anatole France. I think an artist has so great a need of solitude, especially at the end of his life, that he should close his doors to everyone, and not waste a single hour.
For all his reservations, Matisse, too, was currently in process of being promoted to the rank of national treasure. Official attitudes changed drastically in this postwar period, when, as Pierre pointed out, the only aspect of France’s immediate past in which she could still take unqualified pride was the achievement of her artists.46 In the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century, the state had bought two paintings from Matisse. In 1945, it bought seven more. This solid nucleus of a collection was earmarked for the new Museum of Modern Art, due to open in 1947 with a room apiece devoted to Matisse and Picasso. Meanwhile a grateful nation acknowledged the debt owed to its allies across the Channel by exporting twin shows of Matisse and Picasso to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A film about Matisse was in the pipeline, and the Autumn Salon put on a special display in his honour. Tériade’s resplendent Verve—the long-planned Matisse on Colour—came out in November, followed by an exhibition of recent paintings to inaugurate Maeght’s newly acquired gallery in Paris in December.
Matisse escaped a month before Maeght’s opening, to sink back thankfully into the monotony of Vence. “Eight days without seeing anyone, what a treat!” he wrote to Marquet. “Work, books and a radio, that’s quite enough for a modern hermit.”47 He painted by day and drew by night with pencils, pens or scissors. Lydia found him two unlikely models.48 The first was the daughter of a Russian shopkeeper in Nice, Doucia Retinsky, who posed for illustrations to a book of love letters written by a medieval nun, Les Lettres portuguaises. Recruited as a replacement for Lydia herself (“I was too austere,” she said), Doucia at fourteen had a plump, peachy bloom that suited the mix of innocence with passion in this fizzy little text. The second model was a boarder from a local pension, Mme Franz Hift, slender, graceful and part Congolese, a Belgian lawyer’s wife more than happy to relieve the boredom of convalescence in Vence by flirting with Matisse. Young Mme Hift had sat for him before without any definitive result, but now—after twelve months of painting virtually nothing—he put her at the centre of some of the richest and most surprising decorative compositions he ever made.
Everything on the canvas in Young Woman in White Dress—the floor, the walls, the black doorway, the model in her long skirt and spreading mantle of white tiger skin, the striped chair-back behind her and the potted plant at her side—retains and simultaneously dissolves its own identity in the fabric of the painting. The effect is even more pronounced in L’Asie, where the broad, flat, tawny oval of the models face supplies a template repeated in the sensuously coloured patterns of right shoulder, left arm, and the wrap that appears to float in soft, feathery, mauve-and-blue curves above the anchorage of a geometrical red ground. Early in 1946, Aragon turned up in Vence, seeking refuge from the communist purges and intellectual vendettas of postwar Paris, to find the Villa le Rêve hung with “pictures more beautiful than ever, young, fresh, luminous, full of gaiety, more so than ever before, and more confident in light and life.”49 Matisse’s work seemed to breathe a different air from the harsh, drab, materially and spiritually impoverished climate of Europe in the 1940s. “I do it in self-defence,” the painter explained bleakly.
He sent Lydia to Le Cannet with L’Asie and Young Woman in White on extended loan to Bonnard, who had lent him a Basket of Flowers in his late style. Each was mystified by the other’s approach to colour (“I’d like to be able to do what he’s doing,” Matisse told Nelck, “and he’d like to do what I do”).50 What fascinated Matisse was the cloudy opulence of a procedure at the opposite extreme from his own sharply defined structures. “I know he has a colour that doesn’t depend on form…,” he wrote, trying to analyse it for his daughter, “but still its with his colour, which is often applied in skeins like lengths of wool, that he constructs his form (you can see this from black-and-white photographs of his work). And then he has an expressive soul.”51 Matisse said Bonnard’s canvases gave him the same charge of feeling he got from Goya’s, a sense of “being confronted with something passionate and alive.” Bonnard for his part admitted defeat, in almost exactly the same words as Renoir had used before him, in front of Matisse’s expanses of flat uninflected colour (“How can you just put them down like that, and make them stick?”).52 He hung the borrowed paintings on the ochre walls of his dining room, checking up on them at intervals throughout the day and noting how the evening light brought out the magnificent reds of L’Asie. “By day its the blue that plays the major role. What an intense and changeable life colours live in different lights!”53
Pierre said much the same when he unpacked a consignment of canvases from Paris that spring and watched them respond to the luminous atmosphere of Manhattan. “Its an enchantment,” he told his father, reverting to the rhapsodies of his boyhood, when he used to rampage round the sitting room at Issy in uncontrollable excitement over the new work sent up annually from Nice. “Dazzling. A miracle of light and colour… a thousand times more vivid, more brilliant than in Paris.”54 Pierre’s postwar showing of his father’s recent work had a resounding impact, especially on young artists of the newly emerging New York school. The arrival in America of Matisse’s 1908 Red Studio had opened up fresh ground for an inventive generation led by Jackson Pollock, already beginning to explore the formal possibilities of abstraction in ways that would in turn feed back into the mainstream of European art in the 1950s and ‘60s. André Breton, who spent the war years in the United States, said the painters he met never mentioned Bonnard or any other of his contemporaries in France.55 All they wanted to talk about was Matisse, who used colour in ways no one ever had before.
Very different messages were coming in from a wider public accustomed to look to museums and picture galleries for reassurance, and wholly unprepared for an art that questioned basic principles of vision and perception. In England both Matisse and Picasso looked frankly grotesque to ungrateful Londoners, who climbed on chairs at the Victoria and Albert waving rolled umbrellas and bellowing disapproval of works that seemed to make a mockery of the civilised values for which the war was fought.56 There were similar scenes in Nice when the mayor invited Maeght to transfer his Matisse show from Paris to the Palais de la Méditerranée on the promenade. The whole town turned out to pay tribute to an international celebrity whose name few of his neighbours had so much as heard of up till now. Pleasurable anticipation evaporated in incredulity and shock. Students from the art school demonstrated in protest. A “Matisse Scandal” erupted in the local press, which urged its readers not to let themselves be fooled by a blatant conspiracy between international finance and the spiralling ambition of a corrupt art market. The citizens of Nice flocked to see the crude daubs of a madman most people agreed should be locked up, or alternatively elected King of the Carnival and trundled round the streets, pelting the populace “not with the usual banal flowers, but with turnip peel and cabbage stalks.”57 A vibrant red, green and lemon-yellow canvas called Michaela caused particular offence among the students, which, as Pierre cheerfully assured his father, only went to show that the young could not keep up with the old when it came to radical innovation (“The dose of vitality in the picture of Michaela is phenomenal—as René Clair said, its a source of energy. One seems to recharge one’s batteries in the presence of a painting like that”).58
A film crew arrived to shoot documentary footage at Vence as well as in Matisse’s birthplace, Le Cateau (where, Auguste Matisse told his elder brother, nobody even knew of his existence).59 Rouveyre sent waspish congratulations on an escapade “worthy of Hollywold!”60 (“Not that they would have dared demand of you the feats they ask of Douglas Ferblanc!”) The combination of international stardom with increasingly hermetic isolation irritated Matisse’s contemporaries, who saw no call for either. His reserved and forbidding public manner reinforced the reputation for pomposity that always accompanied his bursts of notoriety. Old comrades felt excluded or unwanted. Marquet never forgot paying a surprise visit with his wife to Nice only to find Matisse distant, dazed and blinking as if he hardly knew them, “like an owl dragged brutally from its element of night.”61 The Marquets left immediately, swearing never to return, and were only partly mollified when Matisse rang to apologise, explaining he had been immersed in work and begging them to come back next day. Much the same sequence was repeated with Rouveyre and Jean Puy. However hurt or angry his friends might be, it was difficult to resist Matisse’s fond, contrite messages, often accompanied by scatty little drawings showing him peering out from behind pebble glasses with tufts of hair sprouting from his big bald head and an absurd frill of beard beneath his chin.
Matisse realised there was something monstrous about the consuming passion that took precedence over normal human contact and drove him inexorably into areas where few if any of his friends could follow. “The creators of a new language are always fifty years ahead of their time,” he said, when Nelck complained about the constant misrepresentation of his life and work.62 He told his daughter that any artist who managed to stay sane found himself blundering about in a maze with a concealed exit in the ceiling that never opened except on moonless nights. “The little stump of candle left by the memory of his predecessors casts no light on the way ahead, only on what lies behind. The artist is so made that he can’t go back without giving himself up for dead. He must go forward in whatever direction his efforts may carry him—for every generation the ground behind you is a quicksand.”63 The only artist Matisse knew who operated on anything like the same long timescale as himself was Picasso, and the two drew closer than ever before at this point.
They had exchanged paintings more often than usual in the past few years, and emerged united from their joint London showing in spite of initial misgivings, at any rate on Matisse’s part. “His relations with Picasso were roughly those of one crowned head with another,” said Bussy’s daughter.64 But formalities between them began to loosen up after the war when Picasso started paying regular visits to Vence with Gilot, who had the impression the two were refighting old battles for her benefit, and through her for posterity (she was twenty-five years old at their first meeting, Picasso sixty-five and Matisse seventy-six). Beneath their ritual skirmishing each recognised a tacit understanding and acceptance he found only in the other’s company. They discussed their own work and their contemporaries’, gossiped about the past and speculated about the future. “What do you think they have incorporated from us?” Matisse asked, producing American catalogues of Pollock and Robert Motherwell: “And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?”65
They swapped notes and compared problems. Picasso complained about the effortless, inborn sense of beauty, balance and proportion against which he had fought savagely all his life, Matisse lamented the lack of natural facility that had made his entire career a relentless uphill struggle. Each grumbled freely in private about the other, but Matisse allowed no criticism of his old rival from anyone but himself. He presided with amusement and affection over Picasso’s affair with Gilot, welcoming the birth of their first child with a relaxed indulgence seldom seen by his own grandchildren. “Picasso was very fond of him,” said the engraver Fernand Mourlot, who worked closely with both artists; “he looked on him as an elder brother.”66 But Matisse knew perfectly well that what drew Picasso back year after year was not fraternal feeling, but the work emerging slowly as its creator groped his way towards a new and wholly unexpected way out of his apparently unnavigable maze: “He’d seen what he wanted, my paper cut-outs, my new pictures,” Matisse reported, unimpressed by Picasso’s polite protestations of professional fellowship and neighbourly goodwill, “… all of it will ferment in his mind to his advantage.”67
To others in Vence and elsewhere, Matisse appeared to be heading for a second childhood, sitting up in bed cutting shapes out of coloured paper, or playing with the heaps of fallen leaves he collected every autumn and brought home to draw. The toothy, softly incised leaves of oak, the serrated fronds of cineraria, the spiky foliage of castor-oil plants and acanthus growing wild along the road outside his gate: all of them had captivated Matisse ever since he moved to Vence. He told an interviewer that he spent the night of his first Christmas at the Villa le Rêve filling a notebook with drawings of a single oak leaf, “transposing it from page to page until it grew into an elegant lacy festoon,” explaining that this kind of exercise relieved the torments that destroyed his sleep.68 At the beginning of 1946, he painted a frieze of oak leaves at top speed to finish off the only decorative commission he had as yet secured, a pair of folding bathroom doors for the apartment of the Argentinian ambassador in Paris, which had occupied him intermittently over the past two years. In drawing a tree, Matisse said, it was essential to follow the pattern of its growth, and pay particular attention to the spaces between the leaves.69 Now their lines and shapes informed his hand as he drew with scissors in the same airy cumulative rhythms. “At this time of year,” wrote Rouveyre in one of his annual birthday letters, “I always see the dried leaves on your table, catching fire as they pass under your fingers from death to life.”70
Vence gave Matisse the distance and detachment he had always needed—in Ajaccio, Collioure, Tangiers, Nice, Tahiti—at moments of impending crisis in his work. Mortal weakness increased his isolation as each winter laid him low with fever, flu and bronchial congestion. In the spring of 1946, nervous tension brought a return of the old intestinal spasms, this time so acute the patient said grimly that his screams could be heard half a mile down the hillside. He slept at most three or four hours a night. “Luckily I lead two very distinct lives, one by day and one by night. They don’t mix. What else can I do at my age, you have to accept what you’ve got left, and put up with what upsets you.”71 A nurse was always on hand to massage his legs or make him a tisane, anything to head off the nightmares that contaminated his brief sleep with convulsive cries and movements. He reverted to the strategies of childhood, doing sums in his head, counting aloud in English or German, even reciting paternosters. He wrote letters, filled notebooks, took dictation from the nurse, or talked to her in undertones (“The night was the time for confidences,” said a favourite night nurse).72 More often his attendants read aloud by a dim lamp, murmuring sometimes for hours on end since the slightest pause would rouse the patient from his drowsy state. He drew, and continued drawing in his sleep, groaning and rubbing out invisible mistakes with his left hand.73 In this half-life, his imagination stirred, stretching out to a space that would release him and his motifs from the narrow confines of the canvas, an expanded pictorial space “beyond me, beyond any subject or motif, beyond the studio, beyond even the house… a cosmic space in which I was no more aware of walls than a fish in the sea.”74
The fish in the sea, the limitless new space and the light it invoked were all associated in Matisse’s mind with his voyage to the South Seas. He kept a book of Tahitian photographs beside his bed, and wrote to Pauline Schyle (who still sent him regular supplies of plaited pandanus hats) to say that the woodsmoke from his neighbours’ chimneys in Vence, and the cyclists passing on the road outside his window, reminded him of Papeete.75 Memories he had soaked up like a sponge fifteen years before began to resurface in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. It was in this state, after his return to Paris in June 1946, that he started transforming his bedroom walls with cut-outs quite different from the brightly coloured, separately mounted, largely abstract images that filled the Vence studio. In Paris, he cut white shapes from a block of writing paper, which was the only material available. He began almost at random, producing a paper swallow and handing it to his night nurse to pin over a dirty patch on the wall. Matisse’s room at the boulevard Montparnasse had not been redecorated since the family first moved there in 1926, when it was covered with a pale lining material that had darkened over the years to a warm sandy brown. The white swallow was succeeded by a fish. “Then, whenever he suffered from insomnia, he told the nurse to pass him a sheet of paper which he would cut up, telling her ‘Put it there!’ And so on,” said Lydia. “The next night there were another two or three, then four or five, until, little by little, they made a whole ensemble. The wall ended up covered.”76
By early autumn, all the blemishes and scuffmarks had disappeared under fish from the imaginary lagoon that materialised beneath Matisse’s scissors. The design spread across a wall almost four metres wide, eventually spilling along the top of the doorway and round the corner, to flood out over a second wall in a rhythmic tidal swell, bearing in its depths and on its surface, like the sea itself, every kind of marine life: loops and trailing fronds of seaweed, swooping seabirds, dolphins, sharks, jellyfish and starfish, the whole fragile dreamlike pattern punctuated by lines of foam and the tracery of coral. Matisse, who had attempted nothing on this scale since Barnes’ Dance, had dived without thought or afterthought into an art more concerned with states of consciousness than with any specific visual allusion.
Before he even left Vence, he had turned down the offer of a contract from Paul Rosenberg on the grounds that he was giving up painting for decoration.77 So far, apart from the ambassadors bathroom doors, his only concrete project was a request for a tapestry cartoon from the state-owned Gobelins workshops, whose envoys remained cautious after an inspection of Matisse’s bedroom walls. The pattern was eventually rejected as too tricky for their weavers, and the colour as impossible to match. But Matisse also received a visit that summer from a young Czech manufacturer of fine silks who was starting up a new business in England and hoped to produce silk scarves designed by leading modern artists. Zika Ascher, confident, inventive and resourceful, immediately proposed to translate Matisse’s walls into a pair of silk-screen panels printed in white on linen that would exactly match the soft sandy ground.
Matisse finalised both panels—Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea—in roughly two months, setting up a second studio in the salon where he used a similar technique to design a parallel pair of tapestries for the Gobelins. Blue was their recommended colour, so he improvised a background from two garish shades of cheap wrapping paper, which was all Lydia could find after scouring every stationer in Paris. He treated it as a test of his ability to transform the most unpromising materials, pinning up alternate sheets of turquoise and verdigris, and explaining afterwards that the first and more formal of his two designs—Polynesia, the Sky—was “inspired by the wheeling mass of seagulls above the outlet of the pavilion on the Promenade at Nice.” All four designs for Oceania and Polynesia were completed by the end of the year. Over the same period, work on the illustrated books imposed a punishing schedule at the printers. Tériade brought out Les Lettres portuguaises in October. After fearful obstacles, Les Fleurs du mal was
Matisse, Oceania, the Sea, 1946
finally approaching publication in 1947, and so was the most prodigious flowering of Matisse’s partnership with Tériade, the album Jazz. Matisse spent part of the winter compiling a text to accompany these “lively and violent prints,” which he described as a kind of pop art, crystallising apparently out of nowhere—”from memories of the circus, folk tales, voyages”—in 1943 to focus a wholly twentieth-century sensibility so sharply that even their creator took time to absorb the shift of view-point.79
The bitter winter of 1946–47 was the first one Matisse had spent in Paris for ten years or more, and it very nearly killed him. The usual crop of fevers and congestions was compounded by exhaustion, and by his own violent reaction to experimental doses of a new drug called penicillin. Tempests of ice and snow brought Europe to a standstill, with coal stocks exhausted in temperatures lower than ever before in living memory. Bonnard died at Le Cannet at the end of January. Marquet entered hospital for an operation the same month, coming home in a snowstorm, which he promptly painted. Matisse, more than ever convinced that Marquet needed looking after, went round to spell out basic tactics for survival: warmth, bed rest, special diet, unceasing vigilance against cold or drafts, and perpetual surveillance by nurses day and night. “Tell me,” Marquet asked his wife, after their guest had gone, “is it really worth living under those conditions?”80 The two old friends said good-bye on 5 April, just before Matisse’s return to Vence. When news came of Marquet’s death two months later, Matisse said sadly that he would not have wished to prolong a life made as wretched as his own by sleeplessness and pain.81
His greatest human consolation in these years came from his five grandchildren, whose progress he followed closely and whose visits he awaited with the fond, proud impatience of a lover.82 He drew them repeatedly, subjecting each in turn to a strange, penetrating, in the final stages almost blind scrutiny that astounded them. “He was listening to form rather than content…,” said Pierre’s son Paul, describing how his grandfather asked him to tell the story of a recent film at one of their first drawing sessions after the war. “He was looking with an intensity that would have robbed the most brilliant discourse of meaning, and then suddenly I was free. I remember clearly the inner joy of discovering that we were coexisting on a level that was quite new to me .… I too was momentarily swept up into an existence in which quality rather than quantity held the master place.”83 These encounters were as nerve-racking as they were exhilarating for the sitters. “His concentration then is terrifying,” Paul’s sister, Jacqueline, told a friend. “He acts as if he were stone deaf. His talent is a physical thing, which lies in his hand .… His hand leads him after he has absorbed the object, and he doesn’t look at it any more. He just draws the result of it that is in him, like a film negative.”84
Even without a pencil in hand, the weight of Matisse’s presence and his uncompromising expectations could be alarming. He made no disciplinary concessions, and his affection was not openly expressed. But he watched over his grandchildren with understanding, sometimes with apprehension, describing their separate personalities in perceptive detail for Léon Vassaux, reliving his own problematic adolescence—illness, examinations, love affairs, career prospects—through theirs, and occasionally interceding in favour of mildness and forbearance with their parents. When they were small, he had marked their height on his wall, and pinned their drawings up above his bed where he had once hung his own children’s. Now he organised lunch parties and excursions for them in Paris, and invited them to stay with him in the south. He was still deeply attached to Claude, who retained for his grandfather, beneath the veneer of a tall, handsome teenager in stylish American blue jeans, something of the gallantry and vulnerability Matisse had painted in Claude’s mother as a child. He was enchanted by Jackie, his only granddaughter, who had inherited his own extreme sensitivity along with his delicate complexion and red-gold hair, and by the exuberantly expressive artworks of Jackie’s youngest brother, Peter. But of all his grandchildren it was Jean’s son, Gérard, in whom Matisse acknowledged exceptional ability as an artist, discussing his potential with friends like Rouveyre and the founder of Surrealism, André Breton (an unexpected confidant, stranded for two months at Antibes after his postwar return to France). Over the next few years, Matisse arranged for Gérard to attend art school in Montparnasse, giving him regular tuition (“He was a teacher of rare severity,” said his grandson), and sending him at seventeen on a voyage to New York and the Caribbean, which he said would have transformed his own life at that age.
Lonely and more isolated than ever in Vence in the summer of 1947, Matisse found warmth and comfort in the uncomplicated affection of a former model, Monique Bourgeois, who had been by her own account an honorary granddaughter until her defection three years earlier, when she left Nice without warning to enter a convent. Matisse was scandalised, as he would be again, a few years later, when Nelck announced her intention of marrying a fellow artist. Neither marriage nor the veil seemed to him adequate reasons for compromising a serious vocation as an artist, but he could not resist Monique in her new role as Sister Jacques Marie. He was captivated all over again by her combination of unworldly innocence, strength of character and surprisingly flirtatious wit. Sister Jacques was working as a novice at the Foyer Lacordaire a little further up the road, a nursing home run by Dominican nuns who had set up a makeshift chapel in a derelict garage for which she sketched out a little stained-glass window. When she brought her watercolour round to show Matisse, she knew him well enough to be alarmed by his disproportionately enthusiastic response to her perfectly banal madonna.85
Matisse painted more pictures in the twelve months after he got back to Vence in April 1947 than in the previous three years put together. “It was a veritable explosion,” said Lydia, “a kind of apotheosis.” Contemporaries were often mystified by the powerful, even raucous colours and abbreviated forms of these studio interiors, which weave everything within the painters field of vision into a whole so dazzlingly bold and simple that the canvas itself seems to be part of the inner fabric of his mind. But nothing he painted could appease a growing sense of dissatisfaction and dormant power. Neither Jazz (which had a small but striking impact when it was published in September) nor any other of his recent projects led to further decorative commissions. “The fact is, nobody approached Matisse to make anything monumental,” said Lydia; “but that is what he dreamed of.”86 By the end of 1947, he was sufficiently frustrated to contemplate asking Aragon if the Communist Party would provide him with a public space or lecture-hall to decorate.87 Instead, he showed Sister Jacques’s watercolour to one of her fellow Dominicans, a young monk convalescing at the nursing home, who insisted that the window should be designed by Matisse himself.
Brother Louis Bertrand Rayssiguier ranked almost as low as it was possible to get in the church hierarchy. He was twenty-seven years old, a diffident, idealistic, inexperienced philosophy graduate from the Sorbonne, who had no art-world connections and had never seen a painting by Matisse.88 But he was also an enthusiast, an instinctive modernist and admirer of Le Corbusier, overwhelmed, like far more sophisticated visitors before him, by what he found at the Villa le Rêve, and by its occupant’s magnetic power. Matisse showed him Jazz, explaining that the only difference between cut-paper and stained glass was that one reflected while the other transmitted light, and citing the polychromatic brilliance of the Chartres cathedral as a model of true spirituality untainted by the religious gloom of later ages. Rayssiguier readily agreed: “I should be very comfortable saying my prayers in your studio, indeed more comfortable than in many churches.”89 By the end of their first meeting on 4 December 1947, the two had roughed out a basic format not just for a window but for a whole chapel. When Rayssiguier returned after five days with a scale plan, Matisse asked for a working model, which Sister Jacques made and delivered to him two months later. Matisse wrote to Rayssiguier the same day to say he could already see the chapel completed in his head.90
The scheme was crazily impractical. Matisse might be a major figure on the international stage, but his fame cut no ice with the lower echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. The Mother Superior at the nursing home, knowing his local reputation for frivolity and nudes or worse, refused even to mention his scheme to any higher authority.91 The nuns laughed at the model (“You couldn’t pray in that, its going to look like a shoe-shop”).92 Matisse himself talked of an unspecified upheaval about to take place in his work, and complained gloomily to his daughter that all artists were helplessly dependent on random circumstance (“Artists are like plants whose growth in the thickets of the jungle depends on the air they breathe, and the mud or stones among which they grow by chance and without choice”).93 Only Sister Jacques realised with foreboding at this stage that, once started, Matisse could not be stopped. Brother Rayssiguier returned to Vence in April, when he and Matisse planned the entire chapel down to its last detail in four hectic sessions. From now on Rayssiguier was possessed by a transforming vision (“For a year now I feel less and less Gothic, and more and more Matisse,” was how he put it twelve months later).94
Matisse installed a coloured-paper maquette on the wall opposite his bed so that he could work day and night on the two long windows for the chapel’s west wall. He had been impressed in March by Picasso’s wildly inventive painted plates and pots, six hundred of them on display at Antibes, where Matisse went twice, alone, to make notes with sketchbook and pencil.95 Now he consulted Picasso’s potter about a weird scheme of his own for a wall of white ceramic tiles, to be covered with “graffiti-style” drawings in black paint, and placed opposite the chapel windows to reflect their play of coloured light.96 Rayssiguier had doubts, but for this most ambitious of all his decorative projects, Matisse treated himself as in effect the commissioning agent. This time there would be no question of compromise, and no complaints that what he wanted done was unorthodox or infeasible. Expense was no object. “Of course were spending money like millionaires,” he wrote cheerfully to Rayssiguier before anyone else had seen or approved plans for the chapel, let alone raised a sou to finance it, “even though we’re rich only in dreams.”97
Back in Paris in June, Matisse acquired a powerful champion, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, himself a specialist in stained glass and France’s leading moderniser in the controversial battles raging over the future of religious art. A cosmopolitan operator, thoroughly at home in ecclesiastical and secular high society, Couturier was a realist about the Church (“The mission of Catholicism is not only to give but to take everything”), and about the artists who might be induced to serve it (“We must accept them as they are… barely Christian at all”).98 Within weeks he had secured approval for the chapel from all the relevant Church authorities. Matisse sent for Skira, announcing airily that the publisher would serve as banker and finance the project by bringing out a book.99 Rayssiguier wrote sternly to the recalcitrant nuns of Vence (“What has to happen now is for your congregation to accept… this gift. And quickly, without giving an impression of indifference which would—without a doubt—wreck everything”).100
Matisse already spoke of the chapel as the crown of his life’s work. He firmly overruled a proposal to seek architectural input from Le Corbusier, producing instead a more biddable consultant of his own, the Parisian architect and academician Auguste Perret (“Hell do as I say,” said Matisse).101 West and south windows rapidly took shape in the apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse. Working conferences assembled two or three times a week beside Matisse’s bed. Couturier was constantly at his side, escorting him to the glass-works, or to Notre Dame to check that blue and pink make violet in the southern rose window. They formed a stately pair, Matisse’s commanding compact bulk offset by the height of his companion, who was strikingly ascetic and so elegant in his white habit that rumour in New York said he ordered his robes from Balenciaga. The painter asked him to model for Saint Dominic that summer.102
The news that Matisse was about to build a chapel, and could be seen going about town with a priest in tow, caused ribald disbelief in Paris at a time when it was increasingly accepted by the artistic and intellectual community that the best hope for the future, not just of France but of humanity itself, lay with the Communist Party. Picasso came round to inspect the model at the boulevard Montparnasse, and recommended building a fruit-and-vegetable market instead, in a scene reported with gusto by Matisse, who was proud of snapping back that his greens were greener and his oranges more orange than any actual fruit.103 Family legend preserved an altogether pithier version of this celebrated exchange: “Why not a brothel, Matisse?” “Because nobody asked me, Picasso.”
The apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse had now been swallowed up by studios, like the apartment at Cimiez and the house at Vence. The family paid rare and formal visits. Matisse entertained his grandchildren, and relied on Marguerite as go-between in dealings with his wife, who no longer communicated directly with him. Nor did Georges Duthuit, in spite of the fact that his father-in-law had appointed him joint author with Marguerite of a comprehensive catalogue raisonné, a massive undertaking that would outlast both their lifetimes. Marguerite set about compiling records, contacting collectors, becoming the custodian of her father’s past, while Matisse himself worked with Duthuit on various current projects, providing illustrations for his text Une Fête en Cimmérie, designing a cover for the first number under his editorship of the magazine transition, and supplying key material, together with a book-jacket, for his pioneering work on the Fauves. The two collaborated without ever seeing or speaking to one another, negotiating through Marguerite in an atmosphere of simmering, at times explosive, tension.
Jean…s marriage had come apart by the summer of 1948, and his wife was dying of cancer. Pierre, who had divided his life between two continents for years, giving the major part of his attention to his artists and working round the clock in his New York gallery, was also heading for divorce, writing to announce his intention at the end of the year, to his father’s acute distress. Matisse, who had always been especially close to Teeny, admiring her courage and independence, loving her generosity, gentleness and humour, was torn between sympathy with her and painful fellow-feeling for his son. Images of breakdown and destruction tormented him at night. He told Pierre he dreamed he saw his family lined up like targets at a fairground, ready to be picked off with rifles one by one.104
Matisse turned back to his model of the chapel, working on window designs of cut-and-coloured paper with more than usually terrifying concentration. “Matisse in Vence drove himself to exhaustion,” said Jacqueline Duhême, a young assistant taken on that autumn to help with the endless, intricate adjustment of paper pattern pieces. “His will always got the better of fatigue.”105 He defined the chapel to Rayssiguier as somewhere that would offer hope and respite, a place where people could leave their burdens behind, “as Muslims leave the dust of the streets on the soles of the sandals lined up at the door of a mosque.”106 The model was essentially a machine for making coloured light: a plain rectangular box with long windows on two sides and movable fitments designed for testing experimental effects, like the wooden models constructed for the ballets, Rossignol in 1919 and Le Rouge et le noir in 1939. All three go back to the earliest of all Matisse’s decorative projects, the toy theatre in which he had staged the eruption of Vesuvius with coloured-paper cut-outs and spectacular lighting effects as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Bohain.107 He told Rayssiguier that the sulphuric flame of that volcano was the pure, clear blue light he had looked for all his life, and finally achieved in the chapel windows. “What interests me is to give space and light to a place that is characterless in itself,” he said, explaining that the model was like a blank book waiting to be written in. “I don’t need to build churches. There are others who can do that .… I’m doing something more like a theatre décor… the point is to create a special atmosphere: to sublimate, to lift people out of their everyday concerns and preoccupations.”108
Matisse said that, even if he could have done as a boy what he was doing now—”and it is what I dreamed of then”—he would not have dared.109 Now he had both confidence and courage. All he had to do was fill his empty box (as he had filled the Villa le Rêve) with the contents of his imagination. The only serious problem he anticipated was mortality. “He’d been in a hurry all his life,” said Nelck. “Now he had to economise his forces. It was a race, an endurance course, which he was running with death.”110 In this race, the Church supplied skilled backup. Matisse, who had so often said he felt driven by a power beyond his own control, now found himself for the first time in his life among people who spoke naturally and directly the language of dedication, sublimity and submission that he had always used to make sense of his own experience as an artist. Rayssiguier told him he was more genuinely monastic than many real monks.111 Matisse for his part had no difficulty with religious doctrines of self-immolation, sacrifice and penance, or the ruthless imposition of a divine will that coincided at all points with the will of its interpreters (“We want what God wants,” Rayssiguier explained, “and we do what we believe He wants from us”).112 Both Rayssiguier and Couturier were happy to accept the painter’s will as absolute in this sense. When Sister Jacques protested that she had understood Matisse to be directly inspired by God Almighty, he said gently, “Yes, but that god is me.”113
By the end of 1948, after nine months of intensive planning, the chapel had outgrown the Vence workshop. Matisse decided to transfer operations to the much larger spaces of his old studio at Cimiez, returning with his household to the Regina in the first week of January 1949, the start of his eightieth year. His first move was to strip the big studio, sending away the gigantic philodendron that had served him faithfully for nearly twenty years (“It pains my heart to know that plant must go”)114 to make way for full-sized stained-glass designs: a range of fifteen tall, slender windows in the south wall of the chapel set at right angles to a larger, double west window behind the altar. The apartment became, as Matisse said himself, more like a factory.115 Scaffolds, steps and platforms built of packing crates held the chair in which he sat with a brush strapped to a bamboo cane to paint the ceramic wall panels laid out beneath him on the floor. He went from one of his three studios to the next in what he called his taxi-bed, a bed on wheels with a specially designed tray to hold drawing materials, and a padded chair-back to support him during working hours.
The high, bare, impersonal spaces of the main studio were animated by a constant traffic of specialist suppliers, deliverymen and porters. Assistants starting work each morning entered a high-energy zone, hazardous but efficient and crackling with emotion. “The atmosphere was always vibrant, stimulating, filled with cries of rage or pleasure,” said Paule Martin, another young studio aide who worked on the ladders, pinning papers into place, or helping with her brother to unpack and shift the heavy, fragile, handmade tiles ready to be painted.116 Matisse reorganised his three studios from top to bottom every few weeks, repositioning his taxi-bed and turning the whole place upside down as he focussed successively on the separate components of his design, abandoning one window maquette to start another, switching from stained-glass to ceramic panels, constantly returning to any completed element to alter or recast it altogether in the light of progress on another. His aim was to give the whole ensemble the fluidity of an oil painting. This provisional approach continued to the end, driving builders, glaziers and roofers to distraction once the chapel started rising from its building site in Vence. Looking back afterwards, Rayssiguier said the ideal solution would have been “to raze the chapel to the ground at intervals so that Matisse could manipulate walls, windows and ceramic tiles as readily as he did his paintings and cut-paper collages.”117
Rayssiguier was astonished, even appalled by the way Matisse worked, especially by how calmly he accepted setbacks. He made two entirely different sets of designs for the seventeen windows (“It was like a precious stone in its natural untouched state,” he said of the first set, which had cost him four months’ work. “The new one is the same stone after its been cut”).118 It was only on completion of the second version, in February 1949, that Matisse realised he had forgotten to include provision for an armature of black glazing bars, which meant beginning all over again for the third time. “He’s not in the least upset at having to redo them,” Rayssiguier noted in his diary. Each fresh start enriched and refined the end result. The windows were completed by mid-March in marathon work sessions of up to eleven hours on end. Unlike the previous two, this final version—The Tree of Life—contains no red, a change of key that brought an extraordinary clarity, serenity and stillness to the music of the chapel.
By April Matisse was choosing glass samples. Over the next two years, he considered the physical properties and technical possibilities of glass, tiles, stone and metal, undeterred by experts who assured him that what he proposed had never been, nor ever could be, done the way he wanted. He caused mayhem at the highly experienced Parisian firm of Boney, accustomed to producing huge and splendid stained-glass windows by a process of interpretation and approximation based on small gouache sketches supplied by artists like Rouault.119 Matisse visited Boney’s workshop in person, demanding information about every stage of production, paying extreme attention to thickness, translucency and finish, before finally submitting full-scale designs with meticulous specifications (including an impossible lemon yellow that had to be tracked throughout France and beyond).120 The same relentless precision went into everything from doorknobs and roof tiles to lighting, heating, ventilation, marble samples for the altar and the five different kinds of slate sent specially from the Ardennes for an almost invisible play of colour in the decorative rim edging the altar platform. Georges and Suzanne Ramié, who had turned their pottery at Vallauris into an unofficial studio annexe for Picasso, now enthusiastically embarked on a fresh set of perilous and sometimes catastrophic experiments with Matisse. His ceramic wall tiles were largely spoilt in a first firing in June, and so comprehensively smashed on a second attempt in August that both the Ramiés arrived at Cimiez with Gilot and Picasso, all four apparently more shocked than Matisse, who felt, like an athlete in training, that failure and distress were part of routine preparation for further trials.121
These trials were conducted against a constant groundswell of publicity. The story of the celebrated painter of odalisques enticed by a pure young nun into the embraces of the Catholic Church made headlines in newspapers, newsreels and fashion magazines from New York to Tokyo. The French press reprinted an article from Vogue alongside a romantic picture of Sister Jacques looking, as she said herself, like a Hollywood starlet, with long lashes and pert button nose.122 For her, this was only one of many private miseries in four years of steadily increasing friction. Her fellow nuns at the Foyer Lacordaire, who had stubbornly resisted the chapel from the start, and who believed (like most of their neighbours) that any child could paint better than Matisse, reacted with bewilderment and horror to his successive assaults on everything they held familiar and sacred. To the conservative majority in the Church, his inventions seemed not simply monstrous but blasphemous as well. “I was panic-stricken,” said Sister Jacques, describing the day she first saw Matisse’s Stations of the Cross, scrawled freehand in thick black paint on shiny white tiles in a violent and disturbing sequence of clotted, caricatural, in places almost unintelligible images. This was the one element of the chapel that Picasso unequivocally approved (later, when he saw the butterfly brilliance of Matisse’s chasubles, he admitted that he liked them, too). Sister Jacques now found herself blamed by her entire community for an enterprise that privately appalled her. “How on earth was I to get them to accept these drawings? I stood there, stock-still, utterly crushed.”123
She appealed at intervals for help, only to be told austerely by her novice mistress that a chapel destined for the sacrificial mass inevitably demands suffering from those involved in its construction (“The builders of churches have never achieved anything good or beautiful without being crucified for it”).124 Rayssiguier, too, came under severe and growing strain. Eager, honest, single-minded and as stubborn as he was undiplomatic, his attempts to mediate between the painter, the nuns and in due course the building site often exasperated all parties. Rayssiguier had tendered his resignation once already to Matisse, who refused it with peremptory and touching frankness: “I am an invalid, even if I do my best to disguise it. I need a second-in-command, I can do nothing without you.125
Rayssiguier supplied essential liaison services, but it was Lydia who ran the entire operation from day to day. She organised supply lines, maintained relations with the art world and managed the permanent, live-in, female workforce at Cimiez: cook, laundry-maid, two nurses on day and night shifts, at least one model and successive studio aides.126 Between them they met all studio requirements, apart from posing for Christ (who was modelled by a couple of art students, Paule’s brother Jean Martin, and Nelck’s boyfriend, Victor Crosals), and the Virgin (whose oval face and slender upright stance came from the fourteen-year-old daughter of Matisse’s favourite former model, Henriette Darricarrère, now married to an asthma specialist in Nice).127 Many of Matisse’s assistants were prospective artists themselves: bright, tough, energetic young women, often in their first jobs, eager to see the world and escape from family constraints. They were well paid and generously treated, always included in lunch or tea parties, and introduced to visiting celebrities who came from Paris to inspect the contents of the studio. The work schedule was gruelling, but it was broken up by Lydia with small treats and presents, boxes of chocolates, ballet tickets, trips to Paris. There were frequent festive occasions for opening a bottle of champagne, and at the end of each day’s work, everyone gathered in the studio to drink a glass of muscat, look at the latest book from Paris, or play with the four cats who treated Matisse’s territory as their own.
All routines revolved around the painter, who exercised dominion—part Oriental pasha, part Victorian martinet—from his bed. Models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises (“There were no Sundays off with Matisse”).128 Bold spirits who crept out in the evenings or smuggled boyfriends into their rooms at night faced furious inquisitions next morning. Matisse had no patience with their flimsy, frivolous objections to disciplines he had observed himself for years (“Poor things, they dont understand anything,” he said indulgently, “but still, I can hardly give up my Sundays for the sake of these young creatures, just because they fancy time out with their lovers”).129 The price required was high but in retrospect worth paying. Even those who most bitterly resented his exactions at the time agreed afterwards that Matisse took much but gave more. He opened doors, changed lives, provided access to unimagined and unimaginable riches. “The work became a passion for me, too,” said Paule Martin. Artists like Nelck and Duhême, both of whom learnt to draw from Matisse, were marked indelibly for life. “He had a hard exacting side… a sort of absolute rigour,” Duhême wrote fifty years later. “For me that was his greatest lesson.”130
But the pressures of this way of living were punitive in practice. “It was slavery,” said Paule, “slavery above all for Lydia.”131 In the enclosed world of Matisse’s household Lydia maintained order, humour and proportion, retaining her robust good sense in face of incipient mutiny and sometimes barely suppressed hysteria. In the last resort, everything fell on her. She protected Matisse from intruders—admirers, lobbyists, supplicants, the crowds of Sunday sightseers who strolled up to Cimiez “to see the painter”—and preserved contact with reality for the inmates of his studio. Lydia had no holidays or outside distractions, virtually no evenings off, no escape except for occasional trips to Paris on studio business. Her only time alone was when she shut the door of her room at night, poured herself a stiff drink of neat spirit, and opened a pack of cigarettes. Her authority was cool and unassertive, but under extreme provocation, her face could turn black with rage, according to Matisse. He called her his snow princess, talked constantly about her incomparable qualities in her absence, and could hardly bear to let her out of his sight at home. But he also knew how to tease her until she lost control and swore aloud in French.
He himself kept up a steady flow of curses under his breath as he drew or painted, but it was at night, when he could no longer work, that exhaustion made him vengeful and malignant. He brooded grimly on his own helpless incapacity, venting his frustration on the captive models, or on the night nurses, who rarely lasted more than a few months before they had to be replaced. Lydia herself complained to no one, but there were days when her milk-white pallor intensified and her eyes looked red from weeping. The whole household knew that she kept a small suitcase permanently packed at the back of her wardrobe, and no one doubted that she would leave without warning or appeal if ever Matisse’s depredations became unendurable. But younger women like Paule Martin or Anneliese Nelck who took her part, protesting indignantly about his tyranny and her silent subjugation, slowly came to realise that Lydia, who had a will as strong as her employers, was by her own decision as much a prisoner of Matisse’s work as he was.
On 12 December 1949, the first stone of the chapel was laid at Vence in a ceremony Matisse was too frail to attend. He spent his eightieth birthday quietly with his three eldest grandchildren, drawing them with a long-handled brush to keep him company at night on the ceiling above his bed. Cimiez was awash with tributes, flowers and gifts. Advance birthday celebrations had kicked off almost two years earlier with a major retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, followed by a show of the latest canvases and cut-paper compositions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The critic Clement Greenberg proclaimed Matisse the greatest of all living painters, and the gallery remained packed so tight throughout the run that Pierre said he only had to open his windows for a mass of art-lovers to fall out onto the street below.132 French opinion was less enthusiastic about a second showing of recent work at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in the summer of 1949, when the works in cut-paper were more or less openly dismissed as evidence that Matisse had grown too old and childish to be taken seriously.
Reports of his chapel-building increased art-world disdain. For the rest of Matisse’s life rumours that he had abandoned the atheism of a lifetime to become a practising Catholic vied with counter-claims that he was about to join the Communist Party. Matisse, who would have been happy to decorate a public space for either institution, accepted overtures from both on his own terms. He provided recent work for an exhibition put on in January 1950 by Nice’s pro-Communist town council and heavily patronised by the Church (“I have never seen so many curés gathered together in my life,” Janie Bussy reported to Vanessa Bell).133 Five months later he completed his designs for the chapel—”which means that I am free to die now,” he told Couturier134—and celebrated by displaying them in public for the first time at the Communist-backed Maison de la Pensée Française in Paris. It was a statement of position that exasperated Picasso (who had persuaded Matisse to show there in the first place),135 embarrassed Aragon (who installed the exhibition) and frankly mystified the public.
Matisse replaced the window maquettes on his walls that summer with cut-paper compositions in the same tall format. The Thousand and One Nights, The Beasts of the Sea and The Creole Dancer materialised in a wild explosion of the colours so rigorously restricted in the chapel. Dancer, made in a single day in June, seems to implode and explode simultaneously against a brilliant checkerboard of red, blue, pink, orange, black and yellow, leaving nothing but her head, her green ribbons and two spiky blue-and-white ruffs which might be a corsage and a swirling skirt in rapid motion, like the wings of a bird flashing open in flight. Matisse recognised something exceptional about this Dancer, and refused to part with it to Pierre, on the grounds that he could not be sure he would ever produce anything of the same calibre again in any medium.136
The manufacture of the windows in Paris precipitated a mass of technical and financial problems. Forced to drop various more unrealistic fundraising schemes (including the notion of making money out of a luxury book from Skira), Matisse had opened a bank account in the chapels name and invited contributions, giving his own services free, underwriting the account himself, and topping it up whenever funds ran low by producing lithographs or selling a painting.137 His liability alarmed him, but halfhearted attempts at cutback were overtaken by trouble at the glassworks. Matisse’s stay in Paris dragged out in the end to four months, mid-July to mid-November, spent supervising production in a state of simmering frustration at times dangerously close to boiling over (“You know I have given everything to this chapel,” he wrote sharply to Couturier, “and it will all have been useless if it isn’t perfect”).138 Meanwhile tension between builders, nuns and the unfortunate Rayssiguier reached new levels as the chapel roof went on in Vence. The windows were finally installed in time for Christmas. Matisse pronounced the effect better than he had hoped, with the same curiously impersonal satisfaction he had felt twenty years before, when Barnes’ Dance was finally hoisted into place at Merion in an atmosphere of ferocious strain and barely suppressed violence. “Its very odd, it feels as if the start of my eighty-second year marks a gateway to the unknown, and a sort of detachment of interest in anything around me… ,” he wrote to Vassaux on 6 January 1951. “I was the one who set the whole thing in motion, and the result is sublime, but I feel almost totally detached from it.”139 For his oldest friend, he summed up his reaction to the chapel in a characteristically prosaic metaphor that goes back to the small-town mentality and rigid social hierarchies of their youth: “Imagine a simple postman confronted with his son, who has become a general.”
In February, Gérard Matisse was knocked down by a lorry in Paris, and remained critically ill for three months. He eventually made a full recovery, but the episode left all his relations deeply shaken. Matisse’s feelings for his family, always intense and often painful, found free play in his attachment to his grandchildren, who continued to come regularly to stay with him in Nice, bringing news of their parents and their grandmother. Amélie had finally settled in a substantial property of her own at Aix-en-Provence, finding an outlet for her considerable energy in working with Marguerite to establish lost or nonexistent records for the heroic early decades of her husband’s work. Matisse’s wife and daughter, with no further part to play in the continuing operation of his studio, became in these years joint custodians of his posthumous reputation. Jean had remarried, and rarely saw his father. Pierre—also remarried, to Patricia Matta, the young ex-wife of one of his former artists—was the only one who remained in close, warm, difficult contact with Matisse’s life and work at Cimiez.
It was Pierre who represented his father at the consecration of the chapel on 25 June 1951, a ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of Nice, Monsignor Rémond, in the presence of the Socialist city’s deputy mayor, the formidable Jean Médecin. The chapel’s initial impact, as so often with Matisse’s work, was the opposite of what he had intended. Conservative forces within the Church responded to the glare of worldwide publicity with a virulence that echoed the uproar provoked nearly half a century before by Dance and Music. Charges of sacrilege and scandal brought magisterial rebuke from the Vatican itself.140 The nuns were the first to succumb to the atmospheric power of their new chapel: within twelve months the entire congregation, led by their Mother Superior, had reversed position, abandoning their attacks on the chapel to rally in unanimous defence of its consoling and contemplative calm. “Mother Gilles and the sisters are content, and stand up courageously to those who come to jeer and mock,” Lydia reported to Rayssiguier.141 From now on, indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: “It means modern.”142
Matisse’s own condition after four years of unremitting strain was nicely summed up by his homeopathic doctor: “There is a saying, ‘to give yourself to something with all your heart.’ You can say more—you have given your heart for the chapel.”143 Cardiac fatigue was compounded by the usual insomnia, breathing difficulties and a deterioration in eyesight so severe that by the end of the year there were times when the painter could hardly see at all.144 He started work on an immense cut-paper composition, larger in scale than any canvas he had ever painted, working on it with a young night nurse brought back from Paris in the autumn of 1951. Denise Arokas was nineteen years old, slender, dark and supple.145 Matisse put flowers in her hair and drew her in the pose of the figure on the right of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, who lent grace and poignancy to the dancing girl on the right of his own Tristesse du roi (colour fig. 25). Matisse himself described the three central figures in this work for Couturier: “the sorrowful king, a seductive dancer, and a fellow strumming on some sort of guitar which releases a shower of flying saucers, the colour of gold, to go streaming round the top of composition and end up in a mass around the dancer in action.”146
In the closing years of his life, whenever Matisse looked back over his career in private conversations or public interviews, he insisted that he had been in search of the same goals ever since he started as a painter. Here for the last time he invokes his alter ego—the musician with a guitar or violin—in a setting that goes back to the Bible stories of his youth (Saul and David, Herod and Salome) as well as to the northern fairgrounds and circuses, with their exotic gypsy dancers, which had given him his first inkling as a boy of a wider, richer, stranger world of the imagination. Tristesse du roi draws on the same popular imagery as Jazz. But there is a new grandeur and pathos in this fable of art, life and mortality represented by the guitarist with powerfully expressive hands playing for a lithe young dancer while the aged king, huddled at their feet, stretches out a hand in farewell or salute. Its brilliant elegiac energy was recognised at once by the young artists on the selection committee of the Salon du Mai in 1952, and even before that by Georges Salles, the director general of French museums, who saw it in the studio at Cimiez and immediately arranged to buy it for the nation.147
Matisse, intermittently concerned to leave some sort of published record for posterity, had arranged over the past decade for Skira to commission successively an account of his life and work from Aragon, the Duthuits’ catalogue raisonné, and an album on the chapel.148 None of these projects came to anything in his lifetime (the first and last would eventually appear decades later; the catalogue, which split into many volumes, is still under way). The only thorough and impartial contemporary survey was Alfred Barr’s lucid, eloquent and scholarly Matisse: His Art and His Public, written to accompany a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of 1951. But this first attempt to establish a basic historical framework dismayed both the painter and his family, reactivating a reticence ingrained ever since the Humbert scandal. In spite of patient prodding from Pierre, who took the American view that knowledge should be free, neither his parents nor his sister responded with anything but suspicion to Barr’s written questionnaires, or to the personal envoys who arrived at intervals from New York with increasingly urgent appeals for information.149 The situation was further complicated by the fact that so many key works had for all practical purposes gone missing. In an impassioned speech at the opening of the MoMA show, Barr outlined the ravages inflicted by half a century of war, revolution and totalitarian dictatorship, highlighting the apparent disappearance of the Moscow paintings, which no one had seen since 1947.150 Lydia had reopened contact with the Soviet Union after the war by buying a batch of drawings from Matisse and posting them to the director of the Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow, in token of solidarity with the sufferings of her fellow Russians (over the next three decades she would follow this first gift with others, donating in the end all the paintings and drawings given her by Matisse as a provision for her old age).151 In June 1947, Matisse himself endorsed her gesture by sending a further drawing, but neither his gift nor Barr’s efforts to bring pressure through the American ambassador brought news of the pre-1914 pictures, which would remain locked up in Soviet cellars until after Stalin’s death.152
The paintings in Dr. Barnes’ custody at Merion had been inaccessible in practice, if not in theory, for years. Apart from the Sembats’ legacy at Grenoble, the only representative collection to have passed intact into public ownership came from Etta Cone, who left more than forty paintings, eighteen sculptures and countless drawings to the Baltimore Museum on her death in 1949. Matisse had treated the Cone Collection as a kind of personal museum or ark, and now he opened a second depository in France. The Matisse Museum in his birthplace, Le Cateau, was initially a dream more symbolic than actual. Founded on the initiative of the mayor and a group of local shopkeepers, launched by a donation of drawings from Matisse himself, and installed in the state room on the first floor of the little Renaissance town hall (where his parents had been married more than eighty years before), it was inaugurated in November 1952 in the presence of the painters three children, whose future generosity would ensure that it eventually became the safe-house and treasure-store their father had envisaged.
By this time Matisse was apprehensive even about the survival of his chapel. Worries about compulsory closure (“He talked of possible changes of government, of persecutions and expulsions”) were exacerbated by Aragon’s confident assurance that the building would become a dance hall as soon as the Communists came to power in France.153 Public perception of Matisse’s work as relatively shallow by comparison with Picasso’s intensified as the two drew closer in private in these years. Picasso painted violence and devastation; Matisse required from art the serenity and stability life could not give. But the main reason why his reputation would be temporarily eclipsed by Picasso’s in the second half of the twentieth century was that whole areas of Matisse’s output remained virtually unknown.154 A series of major acquisitions by MoMA of works from before and during the First World War—the Red Studio of 1908, the alternative version of Shchukin’s Dance of 1909, the Piano Lesson of 1914 and the Moroccans of 1916—produced a powerful delayed impact on successive generations of American artists after the Second World War. But what Matisse estimated as a time lag of fifty years was still in operation. A single small show of his cut-outs at the Berggruen Gallery in Paris in 1953 was
The studio wall at Cimiez, 1952
followed by a gap of nearly three decades before either the art world or the public started to make sense of the work of his last years.
Visitors in the early 1950s were hard put to find words to describe the studio at Cimiez: “a gigantic white bedroom like no other on earth.” said a young English painter sent by the Bussys with a gift of lemons from their garden;155 “a fantastic laboratory,” wrote Georges Salles, who sensed high-tension wires criss-crossing the whole space (“The vibrations are so close in these paintings, the forces are held in such a fragile balance that it seems as though the slightest mistake of calculation would have caused a catastrophe. The retina is pushed to the limit of its potentialities”).156 Matisse explained to newcomers that the whole apartment had once been so filled with greenery and birds that it made him feel he was inside a forest. Now he had got rid of his plants, and given the last of his fancy pigeons to Picasso (who drew its portrait on a famous poster, Dove of Peace, sent round the world to advertise a Communist conference in 1949). Instead he filled his white walls with cut-paper leaves, flowers, fronds and fruit from imaginary forests. Blue and white figures—acrobats, dancers, swimmers—looped and plunged into synthetic seas. Diffused and disembodied colour seemed to emanate not so much from any particular motif or composition as from the space itself. “A limpid scattering of colour bathes the whole room, glowing like a rainbow, flaring like lightning, becoming soft and supple, then iridescent again like a rainbow… blue, orange, violet, almond green, leaf green, orderly, organised, each finding its own shape and place in the ensemble of forms.”157
As Matisse’s race with death accelerated, he feared each work might be his last. He was carving into colour with astonishing speed and mastery, cutting out each motif in minutes and waiting impatiently for it to be pinned into place. His superabundant vitality wore out his young assistants. The gruelling pace of work on four successive Blue Nudes left Paule Martin sick and stupefied with exhaustion.158 Pierre, who produced a flow of American decorative commissions, found himself struggling to keep up with his father’s production rate. In 1952, Matisse designed a stained-glass window for Tériade’s seaside villa and another for the Christmas issue of Life magazine, starting work on a third for Pierre himself as well as producing plans for a mausoleum and three alternative layouts for a tiled patio in California (“Picasso, who never makes any comment, said spontaneously that… only Matisse could have done anything like that”).159 For himself he made the huge Swimming Pool, running right round two sides of his studio, and the even grander Parakeet and Mermaid. He told an interviewer that he felt more detached than ever from the moral and physical troubles that threatened to drag him down. “Hell, you know, lies so close to Heaven, and Heaven so close to Hell.”160 He was working now as he had once heard the great violinist Eugène Ysaye play, shortly before he died, barely articulating the separate phrases of a Mozart sonata, caressing the strings of his instrument with gestures so firm and supple “that it seemed as if only the essence of each musical phrase remained. This was how he played at the end of his life. The violinist gave the impression of murmuring with an ease that seemed a little careless. He appeared to be playing for nobody but himself.”161
Towards the end of 1952, Matisse’s handwriting faltered for the first time. He composed a message to Marguerite in elegant, tottery capital letters in September, and often switched to dictation after that. He suffered from intestinal spasms, asthmatic crises and fits of giddiness. Great waves of despondency threatened to engulf him. His doctors tended him “with their fingertips,” according to René Leriche, the surgeon who had saved his life in Lyon more than ten years earlier and to whom he still sent a book or drawing every year in gratitude.162 Marguerite spent the bulk of her time in these years watching over her father in Nice, with occasional side trips to Aix to look after her mother.
Matisse no longer visited Paris, spending the summers of 1953 and 1954 in a villa in the countryside near Vence, resting “in silence and the greatest incognito.”163 It was a return to the isolation and retreat of his first years with Lydia, who could no longer bear to leave him, even for an evening (“It wasn’t that he stopped me, but his sorrow and anxiety were so great that I lost all desire to go”). She had learned to sleep intermittently, getting up three or four times to relieve the misery of Matisse’s nights, so that he might find strength to work again for a few hours next day. Simon Bussy died early in 1954. Sister Jacques tried unsuccessfully to persuade Matisse to agree to be buried in his own chapel, provoking a rare spurt of anger from Lydia, who pointed out that the offer disturbed his peace while he lived, and would damage his reputation when he died (“The chapel… would cease to be a disinterested piece of work and become testimony to an immense vanity”).164 Matisse was justly confident in Marguerite’s ability to circumvent any attempt by the Church to take advantage of his physical infirmity.
“I am beginning to take Renoir’s place on the Côte d’Azur,” Matisse had written after his operation, knowing that his only prospect of survival was to accept the half-life of a permanent invalid.165 He had drawn courage from Renoir in his first years in Nice, and now he followed the example of their last meetings at Cagnes, when he watched life and energy flow back into the dying painter through the brush strapped to his bandaged hands. “I have never seen a man so happy,” said Matisse. “And I promised myself then, that when my time came, I would not be a coward either.”166 Alberto Giacometti, one of the few artists of his Paris-based generation who unreservedly admired Matisse’s chapel, came to draw his portrait in the spring, and again in the summer of 1954. Giacometti drew Matisse in
Alberto Giacometti, from Six Studies of Henri Matisse, July 5, 1954
bed, exploring with delicacy and feeling the skull beneath the skin, the curves and puckers of cheek and neck, the strong lines of browbone, nose and chin. He told Françoise Gilot that what moved him most at these encounters was to see “a great artist still so absorbed in trying to create when death was at his doorstep… when there was no longer time.”167
Matisse’s last work was a stained-glass window commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in memory of his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the three founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On 1 November, Matisse wrote to Alfred Barr to say that his design of ivy in flower was finished and ready for production. The same day he suffered a ministroke. “He stopped working,” wrote his doctor, “and applied himself to dying. His worn-out heart slowly ceased to beat. It took three days.”168 Marguerite never left his side. On the second day Lydia came to his bedside with her hair newly washed and wound in a towel turban, accentuating the classical severity and purity of the profile Matisse had so often drawn and painted. He asked for drawing things, and sketched her with a ballpoint pen on sheets of writing paper, holding the fourth and final sketch out at arms length to assess its quality before pronouncing gravely, “It will do.” “I remember above all its perfect placing on the page,” Lydia wrote of this last drawing, “and the impression it gave of lightness and nobility.”169 Matisse died the next day, 3 November 1954, at four o’clock in the afternoon in the studio at Cimiez, with his daughter and Lydia at his side.
Lydia left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years. Amélie Matisse returned as her husbands widow to resume charge of his work for posterity. Matisse’s public position remained even-handed to the end. The family arranged a funeral mass, which was celebrated in the church at Cimiez by the Archbishop and attended by the Socialist mayor, Jean Médecin, who spoke at the church door. The corporation of Nice gave the plot of ground on the hill above the town where the painter lies buried, simply according to his wishes,170 with no monument except a plain stone slab carved by his son Jean, beneath a fig tree and an olive to which time and chance have added a wild bay tree fifty years after his death.
