The Wild Beast

“When you can or not, you hold on.”

Painter and sculptor Henri Matisse was a wild beast and a frail one, too.

He had a strong constitution—in matters both large and small—that served him well. He kept a fastidious schedule. He would typically rise with the sun so he could paint all morning. After lunch, he would return to his easel. Afterwards, he practiced playing his violin. Following a light dinner, he would retire early.

Matisse’s willpower served him well throughout his life’s many trials, especially chronic health problems that might have crushed a lesser man. After all, this was a man who was born in a cottage that had a dirt floor and a leaky roof. All through his life, he said that rain dripped through the roof onto the bed he was born in.

He was never able to please his father, a grain wholesaler who also owned a hardware store. He thought his son was a failure. He was sickly, not man enough to go into the family business. Another son took that role, and Henri was sent to law school. He hated it.

When Henry was a 21-year-old law clerk in 1889, he was hospitalized for an ailment. Historians disagree about what it might have been. Some say it was colitis, an ulcer, or appendicitis. Another theory is that he got a hernia lifting heavy sacks of his father's grain.

While he was in the hospital recuperating, the patient in the bed next to him suggested that he try ‘chromos’ to while away the hours. Chromos were a sort of 19^th-century paint-by-number activity.

A beast that plunges

“The moment I had this box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life,” Matisse recalled. “I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” (This was actually not his first exposure to painting. His father’s store sold house paint. Henri’s mother mixed them before they were sold, and he often observed her at work and helped her.)

When he returned to the law offices, he felt aimless. But now he rose before the sun to attend an art class. Then he rushed home from work to paint before dinner, and he painted in the evening, too.

Finally, he screwed up his courage and asked his parents if they would consent to his studying art in Paris. His father was livid. When Matisse left on the train, his father stood on the platform, shaking his fists at his son, yelling, “You’ll starve!” He was now an utter embarrassment to his family.

Of his early years in Paris, Matisse recalled that he felt like an animal stumbling around in a dark forest. He was lucky enough to have a stern teacher who told him "No amount of willpower, perseverance, or doggedness in later years can ever make up for lack of technique."

He married a woman from well-to-do and started a family. He achieved some minor success, but soon his father-in-law suffered a financial disaster (An employee had defrauded his company, and he was blamed.)

Thanks to his legal training, Matisse was able to help defend his father-in-law. But the experience left him so exhausted he was ordered to rest for two months. He became so depressed he considered putting down his paint brushes forever.

Fortune smiled on him. He had visited the south of France, and the quality of the light there—plus his growing maturity and self-assurance as an artist—brought a bold, dynamic, bright quality to his work.

 In 1905, he proclaimed himself to the world as a Fauvist. ('Fauves' means 'wild beast' in French.) Such works have an Impressionist feel, but their colors are more vivid and unreal. His exhibition with Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy was received with great hostility. But because Gertrude Stein bought one of his works, he felt that he had finally arrived. The next year he would meet Picasso. He was on his way.

Soon his health plagued him again. When he was in his 40s, he lived a village best by constant winds. He came down with bronchitis. In 1917, he felt his health would improve if he moved to Nice where the weather was better.

But when he arrived in Nice, it commenced to rain for a solid month. Weary, Matisse was about to pull up stakes again, but the next day, sunshine ruled the skies, and he decided to make Nice his home, and he lived there for the next 37 years.

Call on stubbornness

In 1940, the year the Nazis invaded and conquered France, Matisse was 70. He had outlived many of his peers, and he faced his greatest crisis. The next year he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Surgery successfully dealt with the tumor, but the complications were severe—a prolapsed stomach and two pulmonary embolisms.

He faced down this trial. “When you’re out of will power, you call on stubbornness," he said.

For the rest of his life, Matisse was an invalid. He could stand only for brief periods. From then on, he painted while sitting up in bed or from his wheelchair. He even drew on the ceiling and walls, using charcoal fastened to the tip of a bamboo fishing pole. He also began doing paper cut-outs. “I call this drawing with scissors,” he said.

Not long after the surgery, gallstones tormented him. They caused terrible pain, fever, and jaundice. His doctors again advised surgery to remove his gall bladder. But the complications from the first surgery had been so horrendous, Matisse chose to soldier through his agonies. He would spend six months in bed until the episode passed.

Matisse was grateful for his trials. They opened new doors to greater creativity. He called the years following his cancer “Un seconde vie”— A second life.

“I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say,” Matisse said. “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: Free, liberated.”

But that's not all. Matisse struggled with horrendous eye problems for the last decades of his life. In 1908, he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. “Reds had begun to look muddy,” he said. “My painting was getting more and more darkened.”

 His eyesight deteriorated so badly that he could only paint by memorizing where he had squeezed out colors onto his palette. By 1918 he had to read the labels on tubes of paint to know what colors he was applying to the canvas.

“I am almost blind,” he said in 1922. By then he had gone blind in his left eye.

Following eye surgery in 1923, he could now see how wretched his recent work was. He threw away most of the canvases he had painted for the past 10 years.

His perception of color became distorted in his remaining good eye. A rare disorder, xantopsia, gave everything that he saw a yellow tint. (It was partially corrected through special eyeglasses.) He told friends it took two years before he could again see colors as they truly were.

Matisse lived for 13 years after his cancer surgery and for more than 30 years after his eye surgery. He created some of his most acclaimed works during that period.

He saw more clearly now than ever. Said Matisse: “The time you live from now on is a gift from life itself—each year, each month, each day." 

MORAL: See better.

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