Meeting Matisse

For me it was rather as though she had said: “I daresay Jesus Christ will drop in after lunch.” I had been vaguely aware that Simon knew Matisse, but somehow I had not supposed that he would come round for a cup of tea as though he were an ordinary human being. For me, indeed, he was not an ordinary human being, but rather a very extraordinary superhuman being. I have compared him by implication with the second person of the Trinity; I will push the comparison no further than to say that in his painting there did seem to me to be a divine element, and if one may imagine a deity who worked in oils on canvas then he would have had to have been something like Henri Matisse. It will therefore be easily supposed that when the noise of opening doors and unusual voices informed me that I shared a roof with him, my emotions were formidable. Not that I could be at all precise in my anticipations; fate had placed me fairly close to ringside and I believed that I could recognize a champion at sight, but equally it had taught me that great men are great in many different ways. Matisse would clearly be gigantic, but he might also be a surprise.

He was.

When I opened the drawing-room door I concluded that there had been some silly mistake. The guest who was discussing the weather with the Bussy family was indeed a “fine figure of a man,” comfortably plump, fairly tall, his person assisted by an excellent tailor, and altogether very carefully trimmed. But of any other greatness I could find no trace. The chance visitor whom I had so absurdly supposed to be Matisse might well be eminent in the world of insurance or real estate, but he could not, surely, be the creator of La Ronde. But here a difficulty arose. I knew what Matisse looked like, there were photographs, there was a self-portrait—and these, absurdly but undeniably, referred to the amiable philistine to whom I was now being presented in terms which left no doubt that I was shaking the hand of the Master himself.

The mind flies swiftly from one hypothesis to another. I realized that I was being crass. When Matisse explained that the average temperature of Nice was slightly higher (or it may have been slightly lower) than that of Mentone, there was some magic in his meteorology which I missed. If only I could rise to the height of his real meaning, that meaning which was too subtle for my apprehension, I should be enchanted. I tried to soar to his sublimities. It was hard work.

He soon forgot about the weather and turned to his usual topic, which was M. Matisse. I was not, and never became, a close friend; nevertheless, there were occasions when he did tell me something of his agonies. They were not the agonies of a creator; rather, they were the agonies of a dealer who held very valuable stock and felt that the market did not realize its full value. There were occasions when he alluded to the appalling fact that there were persons who had not understood that he was superior to all other painters. He did actually shed tears over certain well-worn and barely legible clippings, brought out from an inside pocket and reread with indignation. These were tears not of self-pity, but rather of pity for erring mankind which, with invincible ignorance, ventured to find fault with his art or—just as bad—bestowed too much praise upon M. Picasso, a painter of undoubted talent, but one whose pictures suffered from the irredeemable fault of not having been painted by M. Matisse.

Vanity was too feeble a word with which to describe the feelings of Matisse for Matisse. There was something candid, innocent, and sincere about his approach to himself which disarmed criticism—and, after all, that immense talent was genuine. But although the great man's adoration of himself was justifiable and, in its innocence, forgivable, nothing could make it an entertaining topic of conversation. The Bussy family, which had offered no comment until after I had met the Master, took the view that Matisse was the greatest living painter, the greatest living egotist, and the greatest living bore. Why then did they continue to receive him Sunday after Sunday? Partly I think because he was Simon’s oldest friend (they had—with Rouault—been fellow students in the atelier Gustave Moreau), partly because sometimes one did get a glimpse of the real Matisse. For the Matisse with whom one attempted to converse chez les Bussy seemed like Henry James’s poet—an unreal phantom who discussed trivialities downstairs while the real man was sitting in the room above writing immortal verse. Indeed, in a painter, such a division of the personality seems less improbable, for the art of painting is even further from the art of conversation than is that of poetry. Listening to Matisse talking about art and life, genius and talent, age and youth, all with particular reference to the Master himself, one could indeed imagine that the man of genius was somewhere else talking to himself in a pictorial language of almost incomprehensible beauty.

Of those sublime communications I heard nothing. Others who were closer to him may have been able to hear something in his talk as great as the things that he could say in paint. For my part, I was content and more than content when the Great Man could, for a moment, forget his greatness and chatter in human tones. This did occasionally happen, as when Matisse would reminisce with Simon and recall old stories of life and larks at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At that time, it seems, one was either a mystic or an anarchist. Simon had been an anarchist. “And what were you, M. Matisse?” asked Janie. Unfortunately, the remark reminded the Master of what he had become. He cleared his throat, filled his chest, and gathered around him an invisible cloak of sententious genius before answering that when he was a young man it had seemed to him that there were already too many people trying to put brakes upon the progress of humanity, whereas now. . . . “Now,” interjected Janie, “it is you who slam on the brakes.” The remark left Matisse spluttering in angry confusion. One would hardly have imagined from Janie’s modest but masterly memoir that she would have been so impertinent, and indeed such interjections were very rare. On another occasion, irritated by the memoirs of Alice B. Toklas, Matisse remarked that Mlle Stein could speak with no authority concerning the avant-garde in France because she knew far too little French, and on this subject he refused to be drawn into further comments. But these little diversions from his usual theme did offer the hope that he could be interesting if not brilliant. And indeed one Sunday afternoon, forgetting himself in the happiest manner, he remembered something he had heard and seen. Could it have been in the South Pacific? And was it perhaps connected with the culture of pearls? It is exasperating, when such trivialities remain in the mind, that this sudden excursion, a simple and humorous narrative expressed without the slightest pomposity, should have vanished. We all agreed that it was a memorable afternoon and that he had been charming.

I have said enough, I hope, to suggest that, so far as my own observation goes, Matisse was better in his dealings with the muses than with his fellow human beings; perhaps one may conclude with a note on Matisse and the machine. This is hearsay, for when I knew him the great man was conveyed hither and thither by a chauffeur as befitted a potentate. But there had been a time when the Master himself was at the wheel. I gather that he never actually made the complete journey from Nice to Mentone (it was all of ten miles), since his progress was impeded by the fact that whenever he was approached or overtaken by another vehicle he pulled up on the sidewalk, at the same time stalling his engine. Even in those days there was quite a lot of traffic along the Côte d’Azur, so his progress was slow indeed. This was tiresome, but the spectacle of Matisse turning upon a busy and sinuous road, flanked on one side by a rocky wall and on the other by a precipice, stopping dead sometimes upon the verge and sometimes in the middle of the highway, and then starting again—either forwards or in reverse—with sudden impetuosity was too much for the nerves of anyone who loved Matisse or painting, not to speak of those of his passengers. I was told that he never had a serious accident. The Fates, no doubt, treated him with proper respect.