What did Matisse do to his models?

Did the ‘tough ladies’ who inspired the French artist’sist’s best work also end up in his bed, asks Alastair Sooke ke ‘Picasso’s women were doormats. Matisse preferred ladies that hit back’

‘When I love a woman,” Pablo Picasso once said, “that tears everything apart – especially my painting.” The history of the Spaniard’s romantic relationships is one of the most compelling sub-plots of modern art. Indeed, in the minds of many, he remains an archetype of the artist-asLothario, a sort of sex maniac whose pictures documented his infamous love life. As Nicholas Watkins, an art historian, put it to me recently, caricaturing this view, “Picasso created art with his penis.”

On the other hand, Picasso’s great friend and rival, Henri Matisse, a French artist, is typically seen in a very different light. Nicknamed “the Professor”, Matisse was a reserved figure who often wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a suit – he looked more like a buttoned-up businessman than an amorous bohemian.

In a photograph of Matisse drawing a model in a studio in Paris, taken by Brassaï in 1939, the artist can be seen wearing a grave expression and a white workman’s coat, like a scientist striving for a cure for cancer. Just a few feet away, her arms raised suggestively above her head, sits a naked woman.

It’s strange: in the artist’s face, there isn’t even a hint of sexual desire, yet Matisse was the great 20th-century painter of sensuality, a man who spent much of the Twenties holed up in hotels in Nice, painting topless girls in harem pants, pretending to be Ottoman odalisques.

In large part, the accepted image of Matisse derives from his own hair-shirted self-characterisation. In 1919, while living in Nice, he described himself in a letter to his wife as “the hermit of the Promenade des Anglais”. On another occasion, he explained that he wouldn’t dream of eating a plate of oysters after painting them.

“I’ve never sampled anything edible that had served me as a model,” he said. “Posing had made them different for me from their equivalents on a restaurant table.” Did he maintain a similar detachment from the succession of nubile young women who posed for him?

Watkins, an authority who has written extensively about the artist, has his doubts – and dismisses the stereotype of Matisse-the-celibate as “a load of old hooey”. On the eve of Matisse in the Studio, a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, it feels like the moment to ask: more than six decades after his death, in 1954, is Matisse, for all his fame, fundamentally misunderstood?

Hilary Spurling, the artist’s biographer, believes that, in their respective attitudes towards women, Matisse and Picasso offer a revealing contrast. “Picasso picked women that he could push around – he liked doormats,” she explains. “But Matisse liked powerful women, with force and character, who gave as good as they got. All the women in his life were tough ladies: he liked people that boxed back.”

Amélie, his strong-willed wife, was arguably the toughest of the lot. They met at a wedding feast near Paris in October 1897 – by which time Matisse had already fathered a daughter, Marguerite, by Camille Joblaud, a model and shop girl who had left him that summer – and married the following year. According to Spurling, Amélie was “absolutely obdurate, which Matisse recognised immediately, and was a large part of what he loved about her. She was inflexible, while he was flexibility itself.”

Several other “tough ladies” were important for Matisse, too, not least his own daughter, Marguerite. She grew up as a studio child during the family’s poverty-stricken early years and was an essential support to her father: Matisse relied on her critical judgment until his death. Then there were the various professional models who featured prominently in Matisse’s art. Among them was the tanned Parisienne Loulou Brouty, who accompanied the family to Cavalière, near Saint-Tropez, in the summer of 1909. Then came an Italian peasant called Lorette, about whom very little is known, but whom Matisse painted obsessively, almost 50 times in just 12 months, between 1916 and the end of 1917. Later, Henriette Darricarrère, who worked as an extra in the film studios in Nice, would become Matisse’s most important model during his early years in the city, where he relocated after the First World War.

“Matisse loved women,” Watkins explains. “He loved the perfumed atmosphere they created, because that was the atmosphere in which he made art. He needed a powerful emotion to make art, a turbocharge, if you like, to get him fired up. That could be the quality of light, the impact of colour, the heat of the earth on his feet – or an attractive model.”

While researching her two-volume biography, Spurling discovered that, during the early years of the 20th century, Matisse may have had an affair with an auburnhaired Russian Jew called Olga Meerson, one of his students whom he depicted in a memorable 1911 portrait. Their likely liaison appeared to confirm what many art historians (admittedly, most of them men) had privately suspected for years: that, contrary to the official line, Matisse was not averse to sleeping with his models.

Watkins believes that Matisse’s approach in the studio would have encouraged this. “Matisse worked very close to his models,” he explains. “When he was doing a portrait of a model, he virtually rested his chin upon her knee. I wouldn’t have thought that he would do anything other than be consumed by total lust at the sight of a beautiful woman in front of him.”