‘Your muse or your wife’ is quite the ultimatum to throw at an artist. But that was the choice Henri Matisse faced in 1939 when his wife of 30 years (you might know her as ‘Woman with a Hat’, 1905) had had enough of Lydia Delectorskaya (‘The Pink Nude’, 1935).
It’s a dilemma which forms the crux of Sophie Haydock’s deliciously immersive novel about these two extraordinary women. A former journalist, Haydock is making it her mission to breathe life into women whose faces we know from famous artworks. Her gripping 2022 debut, The Flames, animated the tangled tales of the women who stripped naked for the troubled German artist Egon Schiele (including his sister and his sister-in-law).
Now she’s at it again with the more –superficially at least – mild-mannered Matisse. Think of her as the art world’s slightly spikier answer to Philippa Gregory, whose long sequence of historical novels sought the hearts of real women in the Tudor court. Only where Gregory, now 71, was once dismissed as a romantic novelist (mostly by those who didn’t read her), 42-year-old Haydock is lucky enough to be writing at a time when ‘herstories’ are given more respect.
I took Madame Matisse on a wet, grey holiday and it swept me into a world of startling, splashy colour. Having vaguely absorbed the idea of Matisse as Picasso’s gentler rival (he himself said he made work to soothe businessmen’s souls, while the Spaniard was confronting mankind with all its inhumanity), I enjoyed the corrective reminder of the seed merchant’s son’s middle-aged determination to épater les bourgeois. Amélie Matisse matched his bravery. She took on his daughter from a previous relationship and pawned her jewels to support his vision, living in squalor and fighting his corner when the critics condemned his ‘wild’, haphazard brushwork and reckless embrace of ‘unnatural’ colours. It was her confident gaze challenging viewers between the lurid smears of green that caused a scandal at the Salon d’Automne in 1905.
No wonder she was enraged by the arrival of a younger, and equally formidable, model, just when her life should have been settling down. But Haydock doesn’t take sides. Delectorskaya (who wrote two memoirs before shooting herself dead, aged 84, in 1998) emerges as a sympathetic character. Haydock takes us back to the Russian woman’s childhood as a doctor’s daughter in Siberia and her forced flight, aged seven, to China with her aunt during the 1917 revolution. We see blood on the snow; a gun in a suitcase; a letter from the Sorbonne.
All three characters emerge as gamblers who bet their houses on big, bright dreams. All walked away from the table with heartbreaking losses and their heads held high. I’m excited to see which canvases Haydock flips over next.
Comments