FACTS AND FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
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That outline was virtually all I had to go on when I first tentatively
approached the same subject myself. It was my publisher's idea. It took
him a year to persuade me that no one had ever written a life of Matisse,
nor was anyone thinking of doing so in France, the U.S., or the U.K. In
the end I sent a message to Britain's leading Matisse scholar to ask
whether this unexpected state of affairs could be true. The answer was
yes.
Matisse had never had a biography, and the reason was that his life
would be too dull to write about. My response was bewilderment. At
that point I knew as little as most people about the painter as opposed
to his work. If I had an image of him at all, it was based on a group of
well-known photographs taken towards the end of his life, showing a
genial white-haired old gentleman sitting up in bed with pigeons flying
round his head.
Reading the relatively limited available material proved little help.
The standard impression, circulated by serious art historians, as well as
by more popular journalistic recyclers, was of a stuffy conventional cit–
izen with an irredeemably bourgeois mentality: a hard-headed business–
man whose undoubted talent for decorative effects was the product of
a thoroughly uneventful life. I couldn't believe it. I could
not
believe that
paintings so full of power and energy had been produced by a dull and
unenterprising character. I had nothing to go on at that stage but my
instinct, a biographer's hunch that insisted something was wrong. So,
feeling as foolish as the little tailor in the fairy tale, I backed my hunch
by setting out in search of what I thought of from the beginning as my
unknown Matisse.
I started by going to see his heirs in Paris. I was granted an interview
by the head of the family, who said formally when asked what he
thought of the possibility of my writing a biography of Matisse:
"Madame, I have no legal right to forbid you." "No, Monsieur," I said
faintly (for I suspected his claim wasn't strictly true, at least in a French
court of law), "but you have a moral right. And if you wish to exercise
it, please do so now, for that would save us both no end of time and
trouble."
If
he was surprised, he remained too polite to show it but,
when I left forty minutes later, he wished me a skeptical"
Bon courage."
Most biographies start with this sort of interview. At any rate, all
mine have begun with a skeptical family assuring me I would find noth–
ing worth saying about my subject after which the life in question
turned out, in each case, to conceal dramatic surprises, the kind of dark
secret kept-in the words of my first subject, Ivy Compton-Burnett–
through long lives and on death beds. Experts who insist that someone
is too dull to write about make me feel these days like one of Holroyd's
