My Wall Street Journal colleague Eric Gibson reviews Hilary Spurling’s Matisse the Master, the second volume of her masterly biography of Henri Matisse, in today’s paper:
Ms. Spurling’s second volume is a worthy successor to her first, “The Unknown Matisse.” That earlier book revealed an artist impelled toward modernism almost in spite of himself. It also raised the bar for artist-biographies, so splendid were Ms. Spurling’s gifts as an interpreter and chronicler….
Ms. Spurling’s book–like Matisse’s art, in fact–is poised and measured, though charged with intense emotion. Her narrative gifts, combined with her extensive quotations from the family’s correspondence, give the book an immediacy that makes us silent witnesses to a long drama of creativity and ordeal. When the last page is turned, we are likely to feel as emotionally drained as the artist did when he finished a painting. And then we are left to weigh it all up, on one side the surpassing artistic achievement and on the other its terrible price.
Read the whole thing here.