Matisse the Master: the conquest of colour 1909-1954 by Hilary Spurling

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In Paris, during the autumn of 1910, Henri Matisse exhibited his gigantic mural Dance and Music publicly for the first time. This pair of enormous panels, each 8ft 6in high by 12ft long, presents two sets of figures: in Dance, bodies writhe in delirious abandon while, contrastingly, in Music, the violinist, flautist and singers appear almost engrossed in their own stillness.

With the full force of his unflagging - and unforgiving - self-discipline, Matisse, who had played the violin as a boy, aimed at "an art of balance, purity and tranquillity, free from any nagging or disturbing element", an art, he said, which could offer his contemporaries an antidote to the stresses of the workplace or the office; in short, a kind of painting that approached the emotional intensity and purity of music. This painting would revitalise an exhausted classical tradition by reintroducing lost concepts of strength and subtlety. It would derive much of its appeal from the sensuality and feeling that emanated from its use of colour. Dance and Music, flowing in stark blues, greens and the muddy orange of flesh tones seems muted when compared with the luscious high-coloured tones of much of Matisse's subsequent work. For, through his conquest of colour, Matisse would eventually be seen as the fulfilment of Van Gogh's prophecy: "The painter of the future will be such a colourist as has never yet been."

Yet throughout a career spanning more than six decades Henri Matisse was subject to extreme forms of critical abuse and prejudice. The initial public showing of Dance and Music produced a devastating response. Crowds jeered and catcalled in front of the panels, which were widely denounced for their ugliness, their barbaric, diabolical appearance. Even the art critic Roger Fry, later a powerful advocate of Matisse's work, privately put it on a par with the work of his own seven-year-old daughter.

Matisse was well used to such humiliation. Six years ago, in the first volume of her biography, Hilary Spurling revealed how he had grown up in northeastern France, a heavily industrialised region that offered the budding artist little in the way of an imaginative outlet. The horizons of his hometown of Bohain - which later never went out of its way to claim Matisse as a famous son - were filled with the smoking chimneys of sugar refineries; in autumn the air was thick with the stench of rotting beets, and the streets slippery with beet pulp. To employ one of Spurling's most striking images, Matisse's whole life might be construed as a flight towards the brilliant light, through one of the open windows that are a constant motif of his work. Matisse's father was a seed merchant, an eminently practical man, who saw Henri through years of penury and endured the derisive comments of his neighbours that his elder son was mad, but who didn't live to see his faith justified. In fact, Henri Matisse Senior died in 1910 just as his son's notoriety was at its height following the Dance and Music exhibition. With ridicule and shame brought once again on the family name, it took some courage for Henri to walk behind his father's coffin.

"If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone," Matisse once wrote. This second instalment of Matisse's story, opening in the artist's fortieth year, and following through to his death in 1954, may be less showy than the first, which at points possessed the great, grinding drama of a Zola novel, but it is equally impressive, and in many ways an even more remarkable narrative of artistic endurance and self-belief. The first volume covered the story of Matisse's escape from bourgeois conformity into artistic freedom. This one documents the modernist revolution that he achieved with that freedom, but also exposes the personal sacrifices - those of Matisse's family, his wife, sons and daughter, as well as his own - that were its inevitable accompaniment.

This was a life of turmoil, an unsettled existence of constant travel followed by self-imposed artistic isolation in which painting offered the only respite of calm and serenity. And each time Matisse broke through to a new level of artistic expression, a leap of vision, for instance, in 1913 demonstrated by his Moroccan Café, rich in the influence of the East and Byzantium, he was liable to suffer a critical setback or drubbing. By the 1920s, he was sidelined by a younger generation of artists as merely the painter of sexy girls in harem outfits. A decade later he found himself compared, once again, to Picasso, dismissed this time because he was considered a lightweight, whereas Picasso's paintings required "intellectual effort". In Matisse's final years, his famous compositions in cut-paper were openly criticised and given as evidence that he was too old or childish to be taken seriously.

The forms of humiliation heaped on Matisse emerge also in subtler forms in the second half of his life. The comprehensive collection of Matisses amassed by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin in the period before the First World War, huge canvases hung to dazzling effect on the walls of his palatial drawing-room, became inaccessible after the Revolution, leaving the artist's reputation to suffer, as vast areas of his output remained virtually unknown. In a particularly cruel sequel to this turn of events in the early 1930s, Matisse painted a huge new Dance mural for the monstrously egotistical American Albert Barnes and his purpose-built museum in Philadelphia, which subsequently remained for all practical purposes hidden as Barnes, piqued by his treatment by the art world, refused permission for anyone to see it. "It's still a harsh life," Matisse wrote to his daughter Marguerite when he was approaching 60, "surrounded by total incomprehension - I would rate the chances of success for even my best exhibition in the future no higher than the toss of a coin... they'll come round in the end, I daresay, but only when I'm far away and can't hear them any more - my life is as hard, believe me, as it's always been."

Hilary Spurling writes staggeringly well about the painting. She is especially memorable in her discussion of The Conversation, that strange double portrait of Matisse and his wife Amélie, she enthroned in her housecoat like some household goddess, he in his work suit of striped pyjamas, described by Spurling as the commemoration of "a domestic spat or grievance in the sense that a pearl is the end product of a speck of grit". But she is alert, too, to her responsibility as Matisse's first authoritative biographer, both in establishing a way of writing about his life that follows Matisse's own precept to work without a theory, constructing a picture detail by detail, and also in attempting to destroy the popular myths about the artist which, in the half-century since his death, have become accepted as historical reality.

Chief of these is the constant rumour that Matisse automatically slept with his models or that his relationships with them were exploitative. From Matisse's involvement in 1909-11 with his pupil, the feisty Olga Meerson (whose own colourful study of Matisse adorns Spurling's cover), to his relationship towards the end with Lydia Delectorskaya, the secretary-housekeeper who ran his life, Spurling finds no direct evidence of Matisse's sexual involvement with these two women, or indeed with any of the other models. Nothing, she makes clear, was allowed to stand between Matisse and his work, and if he sometimes talked in sexual terms about his relationship with his models, it was, as Matisse himself maintained, an imaginative flirtation which might lead to rape, but only the "rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in the face of a sympathetic object". Two other women dominate these years. The sad, embattled figure of Amélie Matisse who, after years of accepting the ruthless demands of her husband's art, finally demanded a formal separation as he neared 70, and the extraordinary, vibrant character of the artist's daughter, Marguerite. Seriously ill in childhood with a damaged windpipe, Marguerite became her father's severest critic. During the Second World War she joined the Resistance and was captured and tortured by the Gestapo. Matisse, who had witnessed the German occupation of Bohain as a child, spent his last years only too aware of the terrible death that Marguerite had narrowly avoided in the camps.

"The essential thing about Matisse's painting is not to judge it with the eye," wrote the painter Jules Flandrin. "You have to look at it as you would look at the sunshine through the window. And then it works, I promise." Hilary Spurling has written a rich and deeply illuminating life, with all the feeling and passion for the work that Henri Matisse himself would have appreciated. This is a true biographical masterpiece.

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