If there was reincarnation Hilary Spurling would certainly come back as a bunny , not only has she written a quite superb biography of Henri Matisse , she also mastered the Art of rabbiting on and on.She had the skill so well honed , even the masterful , experienced Chair Ruth Wishart was unable to interrupt for the first 40 minutes of the talk.The special quality in the technique of Hilarys soliloquy is that she seems almost at the point of hitting the punchline at any time , though that time ,like catching your shadow , never quite comes.
But that is merely an observation and should at no point detract from the remarkable achievement of a biography which helps Henri Matisse to claim his rightful place as a genuine and highly influential Master Artist.
She explained the difficulty of hunting down the story of Matisse , an endeavour of Sherlockian investigative proportions with , in typical French style , of little assistance and a lot of stinging snooty objections.But to her eternal credit she delivered something vital ; correcting a mass of misinformation masquerading as fact and most importantly digging Matisses reputation from the six feet of mud and dirt laid on him by foe and so called friends alike in what was an early use of negative spindoctoring.
It did not help for the case of putting Matisse back to his rightful place , that some of his finest work was only known as titles , but never seen for many decades,in some cases not until the 1990s.This was because a mass of his early work was bought by Russian collectors based in St.Petersburg , after the revolution their collections ended up in Soviet Archives , viewed very rarely.Another massive archive of his work was bought by an eccentric billionaire called Barnes , he stipulated when making his Foundation very strict criterion that more or less made the works owned by him to be keep from public view.
One slight disappointment was , unlike her informative biography , there was not a presentation of his work with vignettes of the background history behind them.This is covered in glorious detail in her two volume biography , along with breathtaking print quality.
Strangely , Matisse is not regarded with the respect and honour one would expect in France even today.It may well be that a French Translation of Spurling is what changes that appreciation.
So to honour Matisse here is a mini-gallery of some of his astonishing work.
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