Entries (RSS) Matisse the Master
‘If my story were ever to be written doen truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,’ wrote Henri Matisse. Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt, exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth-century in paintings that seem now effortlessly serene, radiant and stable. Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manger, secretary and mopanion in the last two decades of his life. |
