"Matisse was born in 1869 in northern France and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border, on the drab, cold, wet beet fields of French Flanders. The same area, culturally and geographically speaking, had produced Vincent van Gogh sixteen years before." Thus begins the first full biography of an artist who, more than any other, is associated with Mediterranean heat, brilliant color and light, and languid, luxurious interiors. As author Hilary Spurling points out, an open window is one of Matisse's frequent motifs. Given the climate of his youth, that image speaks more of escape than of the sea air of the French Riviera.

If all biographers wrote with Spurling's warmth, empathy, and intelligence, no one would likely want to read any other kind of book. The Unknown Matisse is thoroughly researched, with pages devoted to minutiae that Spurling imparts with wit and style, making every nuance of Matisse's early development fascinating. She tells too the story of Matisse's family life (Mme. Matisse risked her respectable reputation by adopting Henri's first, illegitimate daughter), his brilliant ideas about art, and the years it took for his paintings to find their rightful audience. It was her intention finally to give as much weight to Matisse's life as has been given to his work, but in the process of examining the man she sheds new light on the art as well. --Peggy Moorman

From Publishers Weekly
Despite Matisse's prestige in the annals of 20th-century art, there has been no biography published for the general reader until this hefty first of two volumes. "Unknown" as much for that omission as for his family's "invincible discretion," Matisse has been allowed to face posterity as a less interesting, less dynamic character than some of his contemporaries. It is no surprise, then, that the stock techniques of sympathetic biography seem a bit more defensive than usual here as Spurling (author of Ivy: The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett) tries to counter her subject's reputation as the prickliest, stodgiest hedonist ever to lift a paintbrush. Challenging conventional views of Matisse that acknowledge his greatness as an artist "while simultaneously belittling him as a human being," Spurling offers anecdote after anecdote illustrating his quaint mischievousness and selfless encouragement of other artists. She does a remarkable job of evoking the northern textile town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Matisse first assimilated the stringent demands of survival and acquired a reciprocal appreciation of luxury and irreverence. Still, when he decided at age 20 to become a painter, it was as drastic a rebellion as he seemed capable of, and Spurling never quite accounts for Matisse's transformation from a Beaux-Arts wannabe into a reluctant leader of the avant-garde. Her discovery that the "Humbert Affair" of 1902, a financial and political scandal of massive proportions, directly implicated Matisse's in-laws and, by extension, Matisse himself, makes for a gripping read and reveals much about the artist's early development. Six years later, when Harmony in Red emerges out of the artist's intense struggles with the art establishment and with his own radical impulses, the reader is as exhilarated as his biographer could possibly desire. 150 b&w photos; 24-page color insert not seen by PW. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Julian Barnes
The Unknown Matisse is a work of deep research and intense concentration, full of archive-sweat, legwork and looking.

The Wall Street Journal, Karen Wilkin
Ms. Spurling has studied Matisse's writings, looked hard at his work, sifted through the recollections of his friends and interviewed family members and associates to weave an insightful account of the period when Matisse was discovering his identity as an artist.

The Washington Post Book World, Francine Prose
Lucidly and economically written, the book gives us just enough explanatory background, just enough history, just enough atmosphere so that we have some sense of context yet never feel that Spurling is rambling or becoming mired in the tangential.... Spurling also ... displays a gift for finding the action or anecdote that neatly and succinctly illuminates some relationship or character...

From Booklist
In the first volume of her magisterial biography on Henri Matisse, Spurling paints a vivid picture of the artist's lean early years, long before his canonization as master of the modernist movement. Born in 1869 in a small industrial town where art mattered little and artists even less, Matisse pursued his ambition with a single-minded fervor that bordered at times on madness. He spent the first 20 years of his career experimenting in rapid succession with the prevailing artistic movements of his time. He used his plumb line religiously, like his neoclassicist teachers, while rejecting their gray tones in favor of the bright colors touted by postimpressionist colleagues. He adopted the divisionists' strict formalism only to discard it later in favor of the fauvists' wild abandon. Matisse's relentless drive toward experimentation and dogged determination to forge an entirely new artistic vision cost his family years of poverty and ridicule. Yet, with the staunch support of his wife (to whom the book is dedicated) and influential friends such as Sarah Stein (sister-in-law to Leo and Gertrude Stein), he finally began to gain recognition in 1908. Spurling ends the volume at this critical turning point in Matisse's career, but readers are sure to want to read her next volume on the artist who dedicated his life to creating a pure art--"a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair" --for the enjoyment of all. Veronica Scrol

From Kirkus Reviews
A masterfully written biography of Matisse, whose dedication to an art of ``balance, purity, and tranquility'' was his primary defense against a life of hardship, disruption, and loss. Few who know Matisse's work would equate the dynamism of his palettefull of saturated, singing colorswith the fierce emotional intensity of the man himself, but Spurling, a British theater critic and literary editor of the Spectator, makes the connection. With tremendous sensitivity to her subject, she casts the story of Matisse's early life as ``a flight toward the brilliant light'' from the dark and dour northern landscape of his birthplace, Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border. It was, she points out, the same cultural and geographic area that had given rise to van Gogh some 16 years earlier, and while Matisse's own artistic fever was never quite as incapacitating as his predecessors, it was still intense. Matisse suffered from unrelenting insomnia for much of his life and sometimes feared that the blazing colors he had let loose would end by making him go blind. Fortunately, he escaped that fate, although he did not escape being maligned and ridiculed. When Matisse submitted Le Bonheur de vivre to the Salon des Indpendents in 1906, for example, practical jokers defaced handbills posted outside the local urinals so that they read: Matisse has caused more harm in a year than an epidemic! and Matisse drives you mad! Spurling delves into Matisses past with a historian's eye for detail and a fervor that gives her narrative compelling force. She maintains that, from the start of his career, Matisse undertook nothing less than a groundbreaking exploration of color, form, and emotionality in painting. ``Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color, she writes, he was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries.'' Matisse's genius was to make conscious subjectivity the defining force of his painting; Spurling, in this first volume of his biography, excels by revealing the forces that shaped both the man and his aesthetic. (24 pages color and 152 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

The art, youth, early maturity, and life of artist Henri Matisse are thoroughly examined in this insightful biography that also includes 24 pages of color reproductions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Henri Matisse is one of the masters of twentieth-century art and a household word to millions of people who find joy and meaning in his light-filled, colorful images—yet, despite all the books devoted to his work, the man himself has remained a mystery. Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.

Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers—magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty—an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite.

But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.

From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio inCorsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.

Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam—and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family—have been erased from memory until now.

It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.

Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.

In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.

SYNOPSIS

The art, youth, early maturity, and life of artist Henri Matisse are thoroughly examined in this insightful biography that also includes 24 pages of color reproductions.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Shone - Bookforum

Because his family maintained strict control of both personal and posthumous privacy, no full biography of Matisse has ever been written until now. . . Spurling's research is formidable. . . . Spurling keeps her head above the agitated waters of art history, attending to the art and life and avoiding psychobiographical interpretation. . . If her passion for watertight factuality sometimes leads to passages of inertia, it has immense advantages: no one can write about Matisse without this book in hand.

Richard Dorment - The New York Review of Books

Any number of artist's biographies follow a familiar trajectory from failure to triumph. What makes Spurling's life unusual is that she has uncovered a secret family history which goes a long way toward explaining the enigma of Matisse. . . Spurling brushes aside all our preconceptions about the painter to reveal a personality -- and a personal history -- none of us had guessed at. . . . This first volume of a full biography of Matisse is a triumph of research and writing, a work of literature worthy of its subject.

Elizabeth Cowling - Times Literary Supplement (London)

A superlative achievement. . . successfully marrying scholarship of a very high order with a vivid, energetically paced text. . . The teeming richness of the characterization gives The Unknown Matisse the riveting human interest of a classic 19th-century novel.

Jackie Wullschlager - Financial Times (London)

A mesmeric portrait. . . An illumination, not only in its unravelling of the obscure life of a great artist, but as an example of the coming of age of a new sort of biography.

Publishers Weekly