Christopher C. Gorham is the author of the acclaimed biography The Confidante, which recounts the story of Anna Rosenberg, an influential but largely forgotten woman who served as FDR’s special envoy to Europe during World War II. While Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is far from forgotten, Gorham’s prodigious research uncovers new insights into the artist and his family, especially during the tumultuous years of World War II.
Gorham traces the impetus for Matisse at War to a single footnote in Hilary Spurling’s two-volume biography in which Spurling questions a source that claimed Matisse simply painted his way indifferently through the war years. Gorham sets out to explore this issue by mining a wide range of sources that highlight not only the artist, but the wartime activities of his wife and children, allowing us to see personal events in the context of the dangers the family encountered.
Gorham begins his story in an early morning marketplace in Old Nice, France, in 1938, where the fear of invasion by Mussolini’s Italy has thinned the crowds. At one end of the market sits a 17th-century baroque palace. Within its walls, Gorham tells us, in “the high-ceilinged nine-room flat on the fourth floor with its views of the market and the sea, was Matisse. Alone.”
Gorham begins by providing the reader with background on Matisse’s career and personal life up to 1938, and then focuses on the ways in which the unfolding terror of the Third Reich affected the artist and his family. Perhaps the most riveting sections of the book detail the underground activities of his estranged wife, Amélie, his son Jean and daughter Marguerite Matisse-Duthuit, his eldest child from a former relationship. Gorham notes, “Like their shared roles in Henri Matisse’s art career, resisting the Occupation was a family affair.”
Fifty years old in 1944, Marguerite was arrested in April of that year by the Gestapo; her stepmother was arrested separately. Letters from Matisse at the time demonstrate his attempt to cope with worry the only way he knew: by creating. Gorham does more than simply report on these events. With clear, compelling prose, he brings readers into what happened to Marguerite during her imprisonment and torture.
Gorham extends his account to the postwar years, recounting Matisse’s second life after his 1941 cancer surgery. And he firmly lays to rest the question of Matisse’s political indifference to World War II. Matisse at War is a thoroughly researched and impeccably presented portrait of one of history’s great artists and those closest to him.