“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life. Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse ) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable. Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life. But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War. If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling. Spurling devoted two volumes and more than 1,000 pages to her biography of Henri Matisse, and it is clear that she fell in love with the great artist by the time she had finished. Critics labeled Matisse the Master and its predecessor a monumental achievement worthy of its subject, and they noted that the second volume could easily stand on its own. Extensively researched and lovingly written, Spurling brings both the artist and his work to life, even for those already familiar with Matisse. If any criticism can be made about Spurling’s book, it is that she approaches her subject too closely and is too quick to remove his life and work from their historical context. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* Spurling's 10 years of work first on The Unknown Matisse (1998), which covered the artist's early years, then on this astonishing second act, have yielded revelations factual, emotional, and spiritual. And her amazement at what she discovered thanks to her immersion in Matisse's extensive yet little-studied correspondence electrifies every finely crafted page. Here stands a misunderstood genius devoted to the magic of color and the essence of the human form who was "penitential" in his habits, an abstemious man who evolved a "philosophy of endurance," yet whose art is sensuous and radiant. Matisse's commitment to beauty, Spurling discerns, was in courageous defiance of the harshness of life. Furthermore, although he was ruthlessly single-minded in his pursuit of new ways of seeing and painting, he did not go it alone: the story of Matisse is the story of his remarkable family and the responsive women who posed for him. And just as women shaped his art, they sustained his life, especially his extraordinary, long--suffering wife, Amelie; his heroic daughter, Marguerite; and, during the traumas of World War II, his indomitable companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. Spurling charts every phase of Matisse's ceaseless experimentation, especially his deceptively decorative Nice paintings of the 1920s and 1930s and his stunningly liberated cutouts, and she incisively dissects the bewilderment his revolutionary work aroused. A transcendent portrayal of a man who pursued light in a world dark with horror. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Reactions to Hilary Spurling’s The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. I, 1869-1908 published autumn 1998 by Knopf (US) & Penguin (UK) US REVIEWS ‘Hilary Spurling has given us a definitive biography that reads like a detective story. It is an extraordinary and brilliant book . . . extraordinary in revealing . . . so much about Matisse that was previously unknown and unexpected . . . brilliant in the clarity and compactness of its prose and in the sharpness of the insights that appear on page after page . . . This is a truly indispensable biography . . . vividly drawn, utterly c