ABOVE: detail from Matisse’s Portrait of Madame Matisse (1913), for which the painter’s wife did more than a hundred sittings, as described in a new book by Hilary Spurling about Matisse’s Life.

Another biography of a modernist painter, another woeful tale of marital rot, emotional breakdown, aesthetic agony, sexual crisis, and political catastrophe. Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Hilary Spurling’s second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse: Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 in the New Yorker is complimentary, praising the book’s colourful explorations of the last half of Matisse’s life, in which the self-taught painter was initially compared—unfavourably—with Picasso, and later perfected the style of painting called Fauvism.

But of course, being an early 20th century French painter, he was also a total nut. For instance, for his Portrait of Madame Matisse, the painter asked his wife Amelie to sit for the portrait over a hundred times while he fussed interminably with it. Spurling announces in her book that she wishes to dispel first the notion that Matisse was diddling all his models, and second that he was a Vichy for the Nazis. To save you reading the whole thing, Schjeldahl agrees with Spurling that a) he wasn’t and b) he wasn’t. Sorry to spoil the ending for you.

LINK: The New Yorker > Art as life: the Matisse we never knew