Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was relentlessly focused on his art. He was neither a wit like Whistler or Degas nor an ill-starred romantic figure like van Gogh or Modigliani. Matisse affected haute bourgeois dress and was described by a contemporary commentator, Janie Bussy, in her essay “A Great Man,” as staid and self-important. That his life seems an opaque subject must account for the fact that only now, 50 years after his death, has the first full-length biography of him appeared. Hilary Spurling’s two volumes, “The Unknown Matisse” and “Matisse the Master” (Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $40) debunk many myths about the artist and bring us closer to his achievements.

In the first volume, we were presented with an intensely engaged and determined young artist, whose partnership with his wife, Amelie, assisted him in navigating the negative reception that his radical art engendered. Ms. Spurling placed Matisse at the center of a web of friendships and brought him to life as a painter among painters. In volume two, she covers the last 44 years of Matisse’s incredibly productive life. We are carried along by the historical road marks: wars, travel and loves, the strong characters of the artist and his family, and above all, by the artist’s insatiable ambition to create something of significance even if it entailed destroying what he had already made.

It is his wife, children – Marguerite, Pierre, and to a lesser degree Jean – and models who are at the center of the drama. After a life’s work together, Amelie left her husband in 1939, enraged by the presence of Lydia Delectorskaya, an impoverished Russian emigre hired to take care of Amelie, who became model, assistant, and muse to Henri. Lydia cared for Matisse during the war, even nursing him through serious illness. Amelie and her daughter were both imprisoned by the Nazis. Marguerite, who worked for the Resistance, was tortured nearly to death. One of the book’s most intense moments is the description of how, after 20 years of service, Lydia departed immediately after Matisse’s death without a backward glance at the family that could not acknowledge her. Matisse and his family were fierce allies, working together for his art, and their domestic drama is an essential part of the story of his art.

Ms. Spurling describes the radicalism of Matisse’s art being in its search for the essential. She describes how, in painting the portrait of Yvonne Landsberg in 1912, Matisse moved from the naturalistic to the iconic, achieving, in its abstraction, a greater likeness. In her reading we can feel the artist methodically stripping away everything that gets in the way of his “first emotion” arriving finally at the cutouts and the chapel at Vence. This was done, the author shows, at a price of ongoing insomnia, depression, ill humor, manic bouts of work, and a lack of popular reception at home in France.

Matisse’s famous “armchair” quote – that art should be “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue” – is misunderstood today, when Matisse’s art is too readily viewed as easy or pretty. Ms. Spurling’s books suggest a new interpretation, that the proverbial “armchair” might really have been most needed for the artist himself. His struggle is palpable and human in this telling. We experience the profound arabesque of a creative life where every detail and curve leads us back to Matisse’s artistic progress, and we are richer for it.

The Enduring Legacy of Henri Matisse

Paul Resika’s last two solo shows at Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, in November 2002 and this past March, brought Henri Matisse wonderfully to mind. The inspiration of the French master was unmistakable in Mr. Resika’s distinctive figures, his vessel pictures, and the variants on the “Ariadne” theme. It was thrilling to see Matisse’s endless invention inspiring new art from one of our finest painters. With volume two of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse just out, we asked Mr. Resika to contribute his thoughts on the painter and the biography. He spoke with , the director of contemporary exhibitions at Salander-O’Reilly and a painter who shows at Galerie Schlesinger.

– The Editors

Harvey: What new things about Matisse’s character did you take away from Hilary Spurling’s biography?
Resika: The amount of labor Matisse put into his work: endless work; 50 sittings, 80 sittings. What I envy in Matisse, though, is that it seems he always knew exactly what he had to do, such as copying a cast of Michelangelo’s “Dawn” mornings at the Academy in Nice while he made his “Large Seated Nude” (1922–29) sculpture. That’s when Matisse’s life illuminates his work in the studio.The great themes of life — sex, money, and health — seem to have nothing to do with his paintings.They have no effect on my view of Matisse. And yet his life is still a compelling story. He was the supreme intellectual painter who knew himself and knew what he had to do. His antithesis among the great Modernists was Soutine, who was all passion and feeling. Matisse is the painter of our period. I wouldn’t compare him to Renoir or Cézanne, but this is not their period. It is the period of Matisse and abstraction, and he’s our great master.

Harvey: Is there any point where you find that his personal history informs your experience of his work?
Resika: A lot of the history is disturbing in relation to the paintings. To read that the German guns were 30 miles away and he heard them going off when he made “The Piano Lesson” (1916) has no effect on how I see that picture. The guns might have sounded three months earlier or later. Spurling herself makes the point that previous readings of Matisse’s work have been false because of their reliance on socalled facts. “The Piano Lesson” was a central picture for my generation of painters. I’m glad I didn’t know all this when I first saw the painting at the age of 17 at the close of World War II. The biographical information doesn’t change my sense of the quality of his art or my delight in it.

Harvey: This book comes across in many ways as a family saga. It encompasses two world wars, international travel, love, and death. How did Matisse’s intense relationship with his family affect his work?
Resika: Matisse was a fierce king who made his family into his “subjects.” He gave them allowances and expected fealty. He expected them to play their part in both his career and his art.

Harvey: Hilary Spurling describes the ritual of Matisse sending paintings back to Issy from the South of France. The family unrolled and hung his works, critiqued them, and sent their opinions to Matisse. They seem to be very much part of his process. Can you see any of this reflected in his paintings of them?
Resika: Not in the least. They don’t look like his “subjects.” Consider this: In Olga Meerson’s portrait of Matisse, he’s a man at rest. In comparison, Matisse paints his children as he would paint goldfish or aubergines.There are, however, some real portraits; Marguerite with a ribbon on her neck or Madame Matisse in a manila shawl or the stupendous Pellerin.

Harvey: Let’s discuss that portrait of his daughter, Marguerite. We all know the image of her with the ribbon around her neck. However, I never knew that the ribbon was covering the scar from a tracheotomy. Does that affect your reading of the painting?
Resika: No. Matisse is a painter who loved Manet and Marguerite equally. It’s an homage to both of them. There is a novel contained within the biography and the heroine is Marguerite, however the portraits of Margeurite are not illustrations of that novel. While I can’t get the fact of the tracheotomy out of my mind, I don’t think of it when I look at the picture.

Harvey: A lot of attention has been focused on how sexuality is treated in the book, particularly Matisse’s relations with his models.
Resika: Spurling is discreet about sex, health, and money. On the subject of the models she tells us the opposite of what we have always heard. Instead of “he sleeps with all of his models,” “he sleeps with none of them.” Spurling makes a strong case that he needed somebody, either his wife or Lydia, to organize the studio because he worked from the model all day, for months in the case of Henriette.

Harvey: One of the book’s themes seems to be how much Matisse had to endure to succeed as an artist. Do you feel after reading the book that this was borne out by the facts?
Resika: Matisse was rich and famous most of his life and never ignored. Yes, most of his collectors, especially in the beginning, were not French, but he had contracts with the best dealers in Paris. Matisse is portrayed as a great sufferer and a great worrier, but there’s no contradiction in that.

Harvey: What does the book tell us about Matisse and money?
Resika: Not much. In the past, hardly any writers told us about artists and their money. Spurling is also discreet about this. She mentions that he paid for an apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse sometime in the 1920s by selling four paintings to Guillaume for 300,000 francs. Jack Flam [writing about Matisse entries in the traveling Barnes Collection catalog] said us that Matisse’s commission for the Barnes mural was $30,000 in 1929. That would be a huge sum of money now. Consider, in contrast, the impoverished Modigliani or our own Marsden Hartley.

Harvey: What’s the salient thing that you got about Matisse’s actual aesthetic in the book?
Resika: His willingness to make an ugly figure. From the “Blue Nude” to the late interiors, he could make the figures ugly and the pictures ravishing. Matisse was not quick to criticize artists he admired, but about Maillol, who he venerated, he remarked, “What harmed Maillol a good deal as a sculptor was that he so often called a halt as soon as his work reached a satisfactory stage. And what has helped me a lot is pushing on beyond that point, in spite of the high risk.” Right or wrong, this gives me the essence of Matisse. Whatever I think about an artist’s life in relation to his art, I am thankful to Spurling for information like this.