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?If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,? wrote Henri Matisse.
A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954
Alfred A. Knopf
September 2005
Featuring: Henri Matisse
544 pages ISBN: 0679434291 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions
draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally
reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest
nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to
the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions.
Unfortunately, these were generally false and often
damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people
fantasized about his models and circulated baseless
fabrications about his private life. Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second
half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The
Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself.
With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his
voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in
private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of
desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s
attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the
twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly
serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s
models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and
the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his
studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two
decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s
life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved
daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted
all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the
Gestapo in the Second World War. If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame
public image as Matisse could have painted such rich,
powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced
the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his
last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real
Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last
from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary
Spurling.
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