Bright picture of defiance in the face of fascism

Gorham says it took 32 years after Matisse’s death aged 84 in Nice on November 3, 1954 for the world to gain a greater understanding of the painter. In 1986 there was a large exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, DC and a cultural exchange with the Soviet Union allowed some of Matisse’s most important works to be seen in the United States.

This coincided with the publication of the memoirs of Lydia Delectorskaya, his faithful companion from the outbreak of World War Two until his death. That same year saw a 40-year-old memoir by the daughter of fellow French painter Simon Bussy, the publishing of massive studies by experts and the Musée Matisse in Nice was renovated and enlarged.

The following decades saw the publication of Matisse’s letters to his son Pierre, born in 1900 and who sailed for New York in 1924, becoming an art dealer and gallery owner. Also, British journalist and biographer Hilary Spurling wrote a definitive two-volume biography, “The Unknown Matisse” in 1998 and “Matisse the Master” in 2005, that allowed for a deeper understanding of the painter’s personal life.

Gorham recounts how between the 1986 exhibition and Spurling’s volumes, two other books examined the acts and omissions of painters such as André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Matisse as they navigated their artistic lives in a France divided into the Nazi-occupied north – the zone occupée – and the collaborationist south of the Vichy regime – the so-called zone libre.

One of these books, “Artists Under Vichy” by Michèle Cone in 1992, accused Matisse of being  “supremely indifferent” to the war, with beautiful models and sumptuous things providing grist for his ever-deeper journey into modernism. Spurling, however, questioned this assertion, and the dichotomy prompted Gorham’s decision to research his own account.

A lawyer and educator, Gorham asks whether Matisse simply painted throughout the war, ignoring the German occupiers and the Vichy government’s compliance with their aims, including the deportation of Jews, or did he enter the cultural battlefield. And if so, how?  Was he one of the artists who were censored? Did he work around the restrictions and how did his efforts affect his fellow citizens? Was Cone right that he capitalised on the Parisian art world from which others, so-called enemies of the Nazi regime, had been forced out?

Gorham turns also to  Matisse’s estranged wife, Amélie, and his daughter, Marguerite, who both helped the French Resistance. Matisse’s letters to Pierre and friends Charles Camoin and Pierre Bonnard  reveal his worry about their war activities and whereabouts, as well as those of his other son Jean, who engaged in sabotage. English, French and Italian sources from the war years onward allowed the author to explore the choices forced on the Matisse family and their fellow French – courage or survival,  authoritarianism or democracy.

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was born in Le Chateau-Cambrésis, northern France, on December 31, 1869. He became a leading light with his revolutionary exhibit “Woman with a Hat” at the annual Salon d’Automne of 1905, in Paris’ Grand Palais, emerging as one of the country’s most celebrated post-impressionists. Gorham recounts how “Critics howled at the ’barbaric and naive’ forms and the ’colour madness’ but collectors took note.”

Matisse himself commented: “It took a lot of gall – guts – to paint it but much more to buy it.” He became “King of the Fauves” (wild beasts), artists associated with expressive brushstrokes and loud colours. As Gorham describes it, Matisse’s art broke so free of convention it “flickers halfway between the imagined and the seen”.

When Matisse was deemed too old to fight in World War I, a friend told him, “What you can do is continue to paint well”, advice that he carried over to World War II, even though then he was in his 70s and so ill he couldn’t stand at his easel. He was a national treasure, and Lydia Delectorskaya protected him and kept him alive through serious illness and depression.

Adolf Hitler decreed modern art to be degenerate avant-gardism, “an enemy of the state”. As war loomed, Matisse had 40 years worth of paintings and artworks to protect. Much of his life’s work was stashed in a Paris bank vault that Nazi inspectors luckily missed.

He went to Nice for the light. He had a visa for Brazil but did not use it. “It seemed to me as if I would be deserting,” he said. “If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?” He also declined an invitation to teach at an art school in San Francisco.

The ageing artist had an operation from which he never fully recovered, spending much time in Nice in bed. Struggling with pain, he created paper-cut art that became his veiled political voice. The town was teeming with refugees, and the Germans and Italians took over from late 1942. Gorham discovered that Matisse had told one of the Americans tasked with rescuing artists from the Nazis that he’d provided a safehouse for enemies of the regime.

Matisse’s daughter Marguerite, born in 1894, was the result of a relationship between him and his mistress and model, Camille Joblaud. He married Amélie Parayre in 1898, telling her “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more”. Their son Jean was born in 1899. At the very moment Hitler was threatening war, 1938-39, Matisse separated from Amélie after four decades. The break was brought about by Delectorskaya having been brought into the family in 1932 as an assistant to Madame Matisse. The Russian-born beauty became his companion and studio assistant, displacing Amélie and Marguerite.

The three children, as different as they were temperamentally, were allied with their parents in the idea that they had to do something to fight the German fascists and their Vichy collaborators. Each of them took perilous risks during the war; as did Matisse’s grandson, Jean’s son Pierrot. Certainly his daughter, and probably Jean, were lucky to stay alive.

The family matriarch, Amélie, in her 70s, was fortified by her open contempt for the Nazis and their art thievery. Marguerite would ferry intelligence from Rennes to Bordeaux, two cities under German occupation. They were both arrested and tortured. Jean was in constant danger for his sabotage efforts. Pierrot worked for a counterfeiter and fled to Normandy, just as the bloody Allied landing of D-Day was about to commence. Pierre, in New York, worked to get artists out of Europe and mounted an exhibit of émigré painters who formed the avant-garde, setting the stage for the city to become the post-war capital of modern art.

Gorham says he found ample evidence that Matisse was more than a painter of “sumptuous things”, and had really engaged in a form of cultural resistance. The white-haired artist was a symbol to the French people, a beacon of hope to the young, that no enemy could extinguish their distinctive heritage. For him, the continuation of culture was a patriotic response.

In summary, “Through the unrest, heartache, sickness and physical challenges, Matisse would continue to work, painting, sketching and pushing himself to see the darkening world in lyrical pure colour and with the promise of joy. These works have become a testament to optimism in the face of war and fear.”