In 1930, when Henri Matisse accepted a monumental commission from a notoriously eccentric American multimillionaire, the French master hoped that the work would reinvigorate his artistic reputation. But, as this extract from Hilary Spurling’s Whitbread Book of The Year prizewinning biography reveals, creating The Dance proved a challenge so fraught with anguish that it imperilled Matisse’s physical and mental health. When the work was finally complete, the ultimate reward awaiting the artist was not acclaim, but humiliation.
Matisse’s steadiest and most serious collectors in the past decade had been Americans, chief among them the infamous Dr Albert C. Barnes, whose aggressive tactics, propensity for bulk-buying and apparently inexhaustible resources had secured him a collection of Modern French painting unequalled anywhere in the world.
Barnes habitually used his massive chequebook and unerring visual judgement to outwit and taunt his rivals. On buying trips to Paris, he liked to start the day with a mob of hungry artists lined up on the pavement outside his hotel, each proffering a rolled-up canvas.
People told innumerable stories of the humiliations he routinely inflicted on curators, dealers, painters and fellow art lovers. But Barnes had another side. He watched out for pictures like a hawk, swooping to snatch his prey before more hesitant and less clear-sighted operators got off the ground. He loved painting more than he loved people, explaining that the pursuit of the best in art had infected him like rabies.
On 20 September, his first day in New York, Matisse telegraphed Dr Barnes to ask if he might visit his Foundation at Merion in suburban Philadelphia. At the first encounter between the two men on Saturday, 27 September 1930, Barnes asked Matisse to decorate the central hall of his newly built museum at Merion.
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Painter and collector were so absorbed by the possibilities of this proposition that they forgot about Matisse’s interpreter (a professor of French from the University of Pittsburgh, brusquely dismissed by Barnes with instructions to come back in two hours), who had to force entry down a coal chute in order to collect his charge. Both men had set their hearts on this commission, both were notoriously tough bargainers, and both emerged well satisfied from the deal. Barnes was to get a wall painting three times the size of Shchukin’s Dance and Music put together, involving at least 12 months’ work, for $30,000 in three instalments (Barnes had that year paid $15,000 for a single, moderately-sized Matisse canvas). Pierre’s (Matisse’s son) amazement outstripped even indignation when he heard these terms, but his father rated loss of earnings well below the chance to raise his profile and reach out to a new public in America (“Although there’ll be no profit in it for me,” he wrote confidently to his wife, “this work will have important consequences.”) The space Barnes wanted him to fill was not promising: a surface roughly 45ft long by 17ft high, divided by projecting shafts of masonry into three round-headed arches.
It was too high, too awkward, abominably lit and impossible to see fully from ground level. None of this deterred Matisse. “I’m full of hope and eager to get going,” he wrote to his wife on 26 December, announcing that he had already picked his colour scheme and sketched out a format.
By the spring of 1931, Matisse (now back home in Nice) could think of little but his new commission. All other wants or needs were secondary. The whole household was under starter’s orders. Lisette (Matisse’s model) was forbidden to swim except briefly, first thing in the morning, for fear of sunburn. Once she was battered by a freak wave and came home badly bruised, only to be severely reprimanded for spoiling the immaculate purity Matisse needed for his work.
It required long hours, short breaks and exclusive concentration from both painter and model. The choice of form and content for the new work had been left entirely to Matisse, who apparently never considered painting anything but a Dance. He peopled it with immense leaping figures, plunging and thrusting in a dance that extended far beyond the three great arches containing his decoration. Heads, arms, legs, hands disappear off the edges of the canvas to link up with other unseen bodies, half glimpsed flickering in the curves of the arcade. The dancers’ energy flows from one extremity to another, surging across the projecting blocks of masonry and out into an imagined space beyond.
Matisse said that this was one of those periodic points of departure, like Fauvism, when it was necessary to turn back from complexity and refinement to the beginning of human perception in pure colour, shape and movement — “materials that stir the senses”, elementary principles that give life by coming alive themselves.
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At the end of April he posted photographs to Barnes showing two successive stages of the initial layout. By June he was beginning to add colour, and so confident of having reached a halfway mark that Barnes paid over the second of three cheques for $10,000. As the decoration took shape, Barnes himself — “part bulwark, part ball and chain”, in John Russell’s graphic image — became ominously proprietorial, harassing the painter with demands to see the work in progress, threatening to descend on Nice.
After six months, The Dance was no longer flowing as smoothly as its creator had anticipated. An old friend, the painter Georges Desvallières, was frankly appalled. “He is working himself to death on imperceptible changes that bring others in their wake, of which he may well think better of next day.”
Whenever panic loomed in Nice, Bussy (an old friend of the artist) received a telegram: DECORATION IN TERRIBLE STATE COMPOSITION COMPLETELY OUT OF HAND AM IN DESPAIR LIGHT SUITABLE THIS AFTERNOON FOR GODS SAKE COME AT ONCE MATISSE.
Throughout the long, slow evolution of The Dance, Bussy regularly arrived to find his old comrade fraught and frantic (“struggling with his vast composition like a kitten with an outsize ball of wool,” wrote Bussy’s daughter, Janie. “The great dim monstrous de-individualised figures he had conceived began to wind themselves into impossible knots”).
Barnes’s decoration was nearing completion more or less on time and the American press was already preparing a noisy reception for it when Matisse made the horrible discovery that he had been working for 12 months from measurements miscalculated by almost a metre.
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Barnes responded angrily (YOU HAVE MADE AN ENORMOUS MISTAKE) and sailed at once for France. At their meeting in Paris on 4 March, Barnes was sufficiently mollified to agree that, instead of attempting a salvage operation, Matisse should start all over again on a second Dance. Habits of drudgery and persistence drummed into him from childhood carried the painter through the next 12 months. Images of The Dance tormented his waking hours and invaded his sleep at night.
André Masson was in Monte Carlo that spring, working with Massine on the ballet Les Présages. Masson never forgot Matisse’s bleak confession as they walked back one day from the garage to the Place Charles Félix: “He suddenly stopped, after a long silence that I didn’t like to break, to say to me: ‘I’ve lost my touch, everything I do has gone cold’.” Nothing would reassure him. Matisse insisted that his powers had left him.
Matisse attended the dress rehearsal of Masson’s ballet on 12 April, and finished his own Dance just over a week later. For the next ten days the painter and his dog held an informal preview at 8 rue Désire Niel. Massine was one of the first arrivals, declaring that Matisse had embodied his dream of what the dance should be.
But by this stage it was almost more than Matisse could do to organise packing and shipment. He sailed for New York on 4 May with his crated decoration in the ship’s hold. On Friday, 12 May, the day after he landed, he was driven down to Merion by Pierre (who was received with Barnes’s usual brutal dismissal on the doorstep). On Saturday the first of the three canvases was fixed in place in an atmosphere so tense that Matisse suffered a minor heart attack, turning blue and having to be revived by Barnes with whisky. A heart specialist called in that night, and three doctors who subsequently examined him in Philadelphia prescribed total rest for the next few months. Matisse told his daughter that overwork had probably placed irreparable strain on his heart. But his own anxiety was swallowed up in the overwhelming relief of seeing his decoration installed at last. “It has a splendour you can’t imagine without seeing it,” he wrote immediately to Bussy, reporting that Barnes had compared the radiant light and colour streaming through his hall to the effect of the rose window in a cathedral.
But their mutual jubilation was shortlived. Barnes announced that he had no intention of letting anyone see his decoration. To Matisse, his behaviour seemed almost unhinged. Pierre, who drove down again early on Thursday to collect his father, was allowed into the hall just long enough to take two photographs of The Dance before being hustled out. When Matisse telegraphed to arrange a second viewing on Friday, Barnes had already locked up his museum and left to spend the summer in Europe. “He’s ill,” Matisse reported to his daughter. “He’s a monster of egotism — no one but him exists.”
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Matisse never saw his Dance again. Its ten days on display to close friends in a Nice garage turned out to be the nearest it ever got to a public showing. Having left home expecting a rowdy reception in America, Matisse returned to Nice still barely able to take in what had actually happened. For the rest of his life, and Matisse’s, Barnes ensured that his decoration remained for all practical purposes unknown.
The blow Barnes dealt him left Matisse impotent and helpless. He rarely talked about his private bitterness and humiliation, except to his son Pierre, but he did insist that no artist could exist without a public (“Painting is a way of communicating, like language”).
One of the things he liked about Chaplin’s film The Circus was that it embodied his own image of the artist as the little man trying to entertain a fairground crowd, who would slink away with his hands in his pockets if you took away his audience.
© Hilary Spurling 2005.
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From Matisse: The Master, Hamish Hamilton, £25. Available from Times BooksFirst for £22.50, free p&p. Call 0870 1608080. www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
A life of the artist
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born in 1869, in Le Château-Cambresis in northern France. He learnt to paint while recovering from appendicitis at home, and in 1891 he went to Paris to study art. His first exhibition was in 1901, and he soon led the Fauvist movement, whose work was characterised by unusual use of bold colours. In 1941 he was found to have cancer and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He died in 1954.