Matisse - The Life

Penguin Books, London, 2009. Creased spine, otherwise good secondhand copy.

HENRI MATISSE, one of the greatest innovators of twentieth-century painting, was an intensely private person.It was not until half a century after his death that Hilary Spurling's two-part biography cleared away the fog of inaccurate guesswork and gossip that obscured both the man and at times his work. Matisse- The Life contains the pith of those two volumes, universally acclaimed for their revelatory insight, meticulous scholarship and brilliant storytelling.

This new, one-volume edition centres on the ferocious struggles that underlay the radiant serenity of Matisse's work, and traces their intimate connection to the personal disasters that beset him, his family and his country through two world wars.This is, in the author's own words, the 'short, sharp, clear portrait I should have liked to write in the first place'.