Chasing Matisse: A Year in France Living My Dream - Hardcover

James Morgan is the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Distance to the Moon and the critically acclaimed If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House. He also collaborated with Virginia Kelley, President Clinton's mother, on her bestselling autobiography, Leading with My Heart. Morgan's articles and essays have appeared in numerous national media, including The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post Magazine, Men's Journal, and National Geographic Traveler. He and his wife now live in Paris.

Visit www.chasingmatisse.com

Chapter One: Up in Charcoal Country

Where we come from is never just a place on a map. The red roads are drawn in the blood of our veins, the green hills in the faith of our earliest hopes and dreams, and sometimes the blue rivers in the wash of our tears. Topography is a fingerprint.

Beth and I left Paris for Matisse's Picardy on a cold blustery Saturday in December, our leased Peugeot 307 wagon loaded down like a gypsy's caravan. This wasn't the car she had wanted us to get. Convinced that a station wagon would be too small, she had pressed for a minivan. At the Arc de Triomphe, a circle of madness that felt like a metaphor, I steered the car around a swath of pavement half a football field wide jammed with cars, trucks, bicyclists, and even Rollerbladers all going as fast as they could, darting this way and that, peeling off inches in front of one another to turn at any number of the spokes that branch out sadistically from the center. All I had to do was glance in my rearview mirror to know that Beth had been right. In our car, there wasn't even a clear sight line to the back window. Instead, I saw shifting mounds of coats, hats, suitcases, book boxes, file folders, computer bags, art supplies, and even our income tax records (we are, hilariously, a corporation). We seemed to be trying to haul our own topography with us.

"We look like the Joads," I said.

"Jwahds," said Beth, correcting my French.

We traversed the usual pattern of modern office buildings, depressing apartment houses, giant discount stores, and factories. Then, in a surprisingly short time, the buildings were gone and cows were grazing. Soon we came upon a sign proclaiming "Picardie: Terre Fertile." I had long wondered what Matisse's boyhood world looked like, and now I was in it. Picardy approaching winter was a muddy palette, a somber and cheerless farm landscape as far as the eye could see. It didn't strike me as the celebratory sort of fertility you find in Provence. This looked like hard-work country.

Matisse was born, on December 31, 1869, in the little textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis. Eight days later, the family moved a few miles south to Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Monsieur Matisse was taking ownership of a general store. Madame Matisse made hats and created delicate paintings on dishes. Still, Henri and his brother grew up over the family business, which in Henri's years there gradually shifted its focus to seeds, fertilizer, and other supplies for the local beet farmers. In his father's sphere, the social fabric was knit with hard reality, not romance and dreaming. If it took cutting down every single tree in Bohain to keep sun on the beet fields, then you got out the saws.

The irony was that Bohain's most famous industry was luxury and beauty. In the design and manufacture of fine velvets and silks, cashmeres and tweeds, gauzes and tulles, the weavers of Bohain had no peer. They served the highest end of the Paris and world markets. The House of Chanel sold their masterpieces. Members of European royalty ordered their finest fabrics from Bohain, whose diligent weavers took pride in their renowned ability to seemingly reinvent the definition of beauty with each new pattern. But the weavers' own lives were lived in dark, cramped rooms. Their bodies were bent and their faces pale and gaunt. Alcoholism was rampant.

It's a curious combination, this yoked team of aesthetic expression and unindulgent self-discipline. Beautiful textiles and the airy wider world they furnished would forever play a role in Matisse's work. But so would an extreme and punishing sense of duty.

The largest of the towns we wanted to visit was Saint-Quentin, population some fifty thousand. It was the area business hub where Matisse was educated, worked as a law clerk, and first took art lessons. Late on Saturday afternoon, Saint-Quentin's centre ville reminded me of Saturdays in rural Arkansas. The main square, called the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, was milling with rough-edged farm families doing their weekend shopping and socializing, with townspeople running their pre-Sunday errands, with knots of supercharged teens just hanging out like teens everywhere.

We drove around looking for lodging. Beth had by then formulated her Rule d'Hôtel, which held that only inns with three stars or above would have phone plug-ins for her computer; at that point it was merely theory, but the truth of it would be demonstrated time and again in our travels. We also hoped to find a hotel with a gated courtyard. I didn't relish the thought of hauling everything inside every time we stopped.

On a side street a block from the main square, Beth spotted the Hôtel des Canonniers. She checked it out and soon motioned for me to pull the car into the courtyard. "You won't believe this place," she said.

"How much?"

"Sixty-five euros a night."

The hotel was old and beautifully restored, with a handsome black-and-white stone floor and a sweeping staircase flanked in dizzying swirls of wrought iron. It had once been a home and still felt like one. In fact it was: The proprietor and her family lived there. They had restored this place themselves, through four grueling years. A chic middle-aged woman in a bouclé jacket, Madame Marie-Paule Michel, led us up another staircase to a top-floor landing anchored by a deep red Oriental rug. She inserted an old-fashioned key into a lock and gently pushed open the door to reveal a sprawling space with a slanted ceiling, heavy wood timbers, a refrigerator, stove, sink, dining table, cable TV, queen-size bed with great reading lights, and a sparkling bathroom with a huge deep tub. For a pair of nomads traveling without reservations, we had hit the jackpot. I could hardly wait to fill up the tub and warm my bones.

As we began settling in, Madame told us, in thankfully fluent English, that there was only one other guest in the hotel -- a man who was to play accordion at a jazz concert in Saint-Quentin the following night. New to France, I couldn't shake the image of Myron Floren grooving on Round Midnight, and made a mental note to be otherwise engaged.

On Monday, we drove through Bohain to Le Cateau-Cambrésis to visit the newly reopened Musée Matisse. Bohain was about sixteen miles from Saint-Quentin, Le Cateau nineteen miles beyond that. Outside industrial Saint-Quentin, the road quickly settled into muted pasture land, mostly flat, not many trees. Critic and curator John Elderfield searingly described this place in his introduction to Henri Matisse: A Retrospective: "It is a cold, inhospitable region of gray skies above a flat landscape with distant horizons, punctuated by church steeples around which cluster villages of dull brick houses." He could have added that the atmosphere pressed down with the weight of solid lead, the impression I had from the view out our car window.

We snaked through Bohain, the main thoroughfare curving sharply twice, and soon we were in country a little more rolling than before. The colors were still earthy -- grays, browns, and rusts, deep red weathered-brick barns, touches of matte-toned lichens on black slate roofs like scumbled paint. They evoked thoughts of Matisse's famous Studio Under the Eaves, a picture of a small, dark, spare, makeshift art room -- but with a far window opening onto bright sunlight. He painted it in Bohain, in the attic of a house he was renting from his father, during the hard winter of 1902-03, when he and his family were forced by circumstances to come back home to regroup. The painting caused a stir when it was later exhibited in Paris, and Matisse himself always considered it one of his best. Most scholars and critics read it as a disturbing portrait of claustrophobia and scarcity, but for anyone who's ever found serenity being closed off in a room alone making art, there are other possible interpretations. The room could also be seen as cozy -- protective, even. It must surely have felt that way to Matisse at the time he painted it. Beyond those tight walls his world was bleak. After ten years of art study and few sales, Henri had "given up trying to please anyone but himself," as Hilary Spurling says in her excellent biography, The Unknown Matisse. Now, in letters from Bohain, where even beautiful fabrics were primarily a matter of no-nonsense wage earning, he told friends he was thinking of quitting painting altogether. His humiliated father told him that everyone in town took him for an imbecile.

In Studio Under the Eaves, hope floats like motes on the light from that one small opening. I imagine Matisse standing at the actual window looking out over the next-door factory to the land where he had come of age. He had always been a dreamer, as a young boy playing knights with his brother and friends in the ruins of Bohain's medieval castle, or attending visiting circus shows and imagining himself performing for the crowds. He established his own toy theater, putting on spectacles -- such as the eruption of Vesuvius, in sulfuric blue -- for his friends. In time he began studying the violin, an instrument that would show up time and again in his paintings, and he later equated making pictures with performing -- with grabbing an audience by the lapels and telling them stories. Had he remained in Picardy, his narrative would've been dark and deeply shadowed, a modulated tale of a measured life. From the beginning he knew he wanted more. "You have first of all to feel this light," he said, "to find it within yourself."

Approaching Le Cateau, we could see a church steeple, which proved to be that of église Saint-Martin, where Matisse was baptized. The road took us almost through the village, then twisted back left and brought us out on a busy street that sloped downward from the church to the river Selle. To the right at the bottom of the hill was the Matisse Museum.

It was more impressive than we had expected, a former palace, in fact -- the Palais Fénelon, once the home of an archbishop. The museum had originally opened in another building in 1952, the aged Matisse himself donating many paintings and drawings. Since then, the collection had wandered from location to location, and had reopened only months before with a grand fete attended by dignitaries from all over France, including Matisse's three grandchildren. This building was laid out in a large U, with a wide brick courtyard entered through an imposing gated arch. Unfortunately, the gate was locked. Ice on the bricks, a sign said.

We wandered around to the back, through an expansive garden, and found an open door. The lobby was full of elementary school kids, all giggly and picking at one another's shirts and hair while their teachers tried to impose decorum. We bought our tickets and began the tour. The special exhibit had been donated by Alice Tériade, widow of the influential editor of Verve, Efstratios Eleftheriades -- known simply as Tériade -- who had commissioned every important artist of the time to design covers and features for his magazine. In the first downstairs gallery were pictures by Picasso, Léger, Chagall, Bonnard, Giacometti, Miró, Gris, Villon, Rouault, and, of course, Matisse.

Upstairs, beginning with samples of delicate Picardy silks, jacquards, and cashmeres, hung Matisse paintings that ranged from his early dark palette, through his shocking Fauvist period, and on to the large, colorful, stunning canvases from his time in Nice. There were many paintings I had never seen before -- paintings I didn't even know existed. In another large gallery, this one slightly darkened, his four huge bas-relief sculptures of backs were spaced out on a long wall, like pillars.

In the long upstairs side gallery, we found a class of students solemnly studying, at close range, Matisse's drawings of impressively endowed nudes, both male and female. "Can you imagine that happening at home?" Beth whispered. "Some religious nut would be calling the school and having that teacher's job." The gallery devoted to Matisse's cutouts had become an atelier for second-graders -- they were sitting and lying on the floor, filling every square meter, cutting and pasting their own bright paper shapes onto big sheets of white stock. One boy was cutting up more than cutting out, and a stern-eyed guard had stationed himself nearby to make sure no one got truly reckless.

Later, while Beth shopped for books and posters -- the latter to tape up around me for inspiration when I was writing -- I was staring out the front window as the cutout class made its ragged exit across the courtyard. One of the last in line was the bad boy, who was gesturing in the direction of the upstairs gallery. I glanced over and saw the stern guard, dressed in Matisse blue, standing at the tinted window, watching. The bad boy had a museum directory in his hand, which he first wagged as a tail. The guard was not amused. Then the boy wagged his directory as a horn. The guard remained stoic. Finally, just as he passed through the gate, the boy placed his directory on his middle finger and wagged it back and forth, slowly, repeatedly, until he disappeared behind the wall.

Matisse would probably have liked that kid. A notorious schoolboy cutup himself, he had once spat on the top hat of his art teacher in Saint-Quentin as the man ascended the stairs to class. As a frustrated lawyer's clerk, he would take out his pea shooter and pop passersby with wads of paper. Defiance, for an artist, can be a powerful arm of the creative arsenal.

On Monday afternoon our hotel was filling up with out-of-town businesspeople, and we had to move downstairs to a smaller room. She had a lot of regulars, Marie-Paule said. One psychologist had come in from Paris every Monday night for years. She arrived at 9:30, went out for dinner, came back and turned off her light, and returned to Paris Tuesday afternoon after her work was done.

That evening before supper, I sat in a comfortable chair on the landing above the marble staircase working on my notes. Downstairs, Marie-Paule was preparing for a big family dinner. The occasion was the impending departure, on Wednesday, of her oldest son, Victor, who was moving to California to start management training at the Ritz-Carlton. Marie-Paule was feeling very motherly, a little weepy, and had asked us what Laguna Beach was like. She wondered if Victor would like it, and it him. She and her husband, Gilles, were already making plans to visit him in August. "It'll be the first time ever that we've closed the hotel," she said.

As I wrote, I could hear the clatter of pots and the occasional clink of fine china. Soon Victor's sister arrived with her daughter, whose squeals and laughter infused the house with the palpable feel of family. I strained to hear those same joyous sounds in the story of the family Matisse, but I couldn't make them come to life. Monsieur Matisse, Henri's father, had always expected his older son to take over the family seed business, but as Henri's schooling was drawing to an end the very thought of such a future made the young man physically ill. He collapsed into bed for weeks complaining of stomach problems. Finally, abandoning all thought of Henri's running the family firm, and hoping now just to steer him toward gainful employment, Monsieur Matisse secured his son a job working for a local lawyer.

Henri seemed to do well, and even suggested to his father that he go to Paris for a year and study law. Upon his return he began working for a lawyer in Saint-Quentin. That's when reality set in. He was miserable, and soon fell into bed with a relapse. Thoroughly disgusted, Monsieur Matisse gave up on him. While Henri was recuperating, a neighbor suggest...