joseph scissorhands: Matisse et Margeurite: Le Regard D'un Père

Henri Matisse - Marguerite au chat noir, 1910 (detail)

"This painting wants to take me somewhere else. Do you feel up to it?" - Henri Matisse.

I somehow found myself once again in Paris. And on this my second visit of the year, I made my way across the city to the magnificent 1930s Palais de Tokyo complex to see this exhibition at Musée D'Art Moderne examining the relationship between artist Henri Matisse ( 1869-1954), and his daughter Marguerite (1894-1982), whose likeness he captured exhaustively from childhood to adulthood in a series of paintings, drawings prints and sculptures. Marguerite was a constant muse who he painted more than any other sitter and who appears to have featured in Matisse's oeuvre in all its stylistic shifts throughout the decades. There are over 100 artworks on display many from private collections which have never before been exhibited in public. Matisse was the son of a wealthy grain merchant from northern France, who worked as a court administrator in Paris when he was confined to bed after an attack of appendicitis at the age of 20. To combat the boredom, his mother bought him art supplies and he discovered what he called “a kind of paradise” in art. His father was deeply disappointed. His daughter Marguerite was born in 1894 after the painter’s relationship with one of his models, Caroline Joblau, when he was in Paris studying art. Unusually for the time, Matisse recognised and claimed the child when the couple split. Four years later, when he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, he brought Marguerite to live with his new family, where she was brought up with two half-brothers, Jean and Pierre. ‘We are like the five fingers of one hand,’ Marguerite wrote about her unconventional but loving family. At six years of age, Marguerite contracted diphtheria and had to have an emergency tracheotomy. The operation damaged her larynx, and she was in constant pain for the next 20 years, which left her missing school and confined at home, where she spent hours with her father in his studio. Matisse’s portraits from this period depict Marguerite wearing a black ribbon or high-neck blouses which she wore to cover the tracheotomy scar. The most familiar of these is Marguerite with a Black Cat, completed in 1910, and hailed as bold and radical when exhibited in Berlin and New York. Matisse loved the painting so much that he kept it rather than sell it. Matisse's paintings show Marguerite as she blossomed into a young woman and at the age of 26 she had a further successful operation to repair the scarring on her throat and as a result was subsequently painted without the ribbons and high necked dresses. Marguerite took up painting (several of her own works are included in the exhibition), and married the writer and art critic Georges Duthuit. Marguerite stopped painting in 1925, instead devoting herself to being Matisse’s studio assistant, overseeing the editioning of his engravings and prints, supervising exhibitions, cataloguing his work and acting as an agent selling Matisse's works. As well as the art in the exhibition there are extracts of letters exchanged between the two that emphasise the special nature of their relationship. Matisse had moved to Nice in the south of France and Marguerite was based in Paris and they wrote to each other on an almost daily basis. The letters reveal a side to Matisse of being a kindly, worried, attentive father. In 1935, Marguerite was separated from Duthuit and living alone in Paris with their baby son, Claude. Marguerite had always loved fashion like her father and attempted to forge a career as a fashion designer which did not go well. There are examples of her dresses included in the exhibition and pictures below, as well as textiles owned by Matisse. Perhaps most dramatically Marguerite (as if she hadn't endured enough trauma in her life), became involved with the French Resistance. In 1945, Marguerite was arrested and tortured and after months in prison, was in the process of being deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp when fate interrupted, an Allied bombing raid halted the train carrying her and the other prisoners, and she was able to escape before reaching Germany. Matisse’s final portraits of Marguerite date from 1945, and reflect his concern over the danger and suffering she endured during the war. After the war Marguerite Duthuit Matisse continued the process of cataloguing her father's work before dying in Paris in 1982, at the age of 87. We knew next to nothing of Marguerite. We all know something of Matisse the artist, but few of us know of Matisse the family man, and devoted father to his illegitimate daughter. This enlightening exhibition gives us an important taste of both equally.

Having finished the exhibition I went into the Room Matisse section of the Musée D'Art Moderne to see Matisse's huge La Danse murals once again which were as impressive as ever. It was both a privilege and interesting to see a piece of performance art being staged and played out in the gallery as a dancer performed with a piece of fabric, engaging it with his body as he moved within the space in a dance in conversation with the dancers in the Matisse murals.