Cultural Comment: Essay: The scandalous triple failure of Henri Matisse

Matisse is perhaps the last major 20th century figure whose story has not yet been told. Ten years ago, when my editor first suggested him as a subject, I found it hard to credit that there had never been a biography. And I couldn't believe the art experts who assured me that, unlike Picasso's, Matisse's life was too dull to write about.

At that stage I had nothing to go on but my instinct. So little was known about Matisse's private life that people had simply assumed him to be the opposite of Picasso. The more the one played the role of joker, tearaway and rebel, the more firmly the other was cast by contrast as a stuffily conventional citizen with bourgeois tastes and no streak of the adventurer in his make-up. The general impression was reinforced by images like Cartier- Bresson's celebrated photo of Matisse as a comfortable white-haired old gentleman in a night-cap with pigeons flying round his head.

But the character who emerged from my researches was the opposite of this image. My book aims to explode the myth of a dull, tame, solemn and over-cautious Matisse by showing that his early life - unlike Picasso's - consisted of a series of ordeals which he could not have survived, either as a man or a painter, without a combination of innate recklessness and extreme courage.

Matisse when young was consumed by a passion for risk and danger that struck other people as half-cracked. When he shocked the public in 1905 with a batch of paintings that looked more like graffiti, crudely slashed and smeared with daubs of colour, it wasn't only the critics who took them for the work of a wild beast, or Fauve.

He made even close friends feel uneasy. People who didn't know him kept their distance. Matisse spelt trouble at the turn of the century, loping round the Left Bank with his red beard and glittering eyes, his black sheepskin coat turned inside out, and his roll of crazy paintings under one arm. Already in 1900 he seemed to his contemporaries to be unleashing demons. Matisse himself said that the forces he let loose on canvas five years later felt like witchcraft.

His demonic aspect was painted in the summer of 1905 by Andre Derain, who caught Matisse red-handed and white-faced, clutching a paintbrush dipped in red, his eyes blank and his neck encircled by a red beard that looks more like a noose. Derain's portrait shows a man possessed, or blown out of his mind. When Matisse painted himself soon afterwards - gaunt- faced with a shaven head, wild beard and shirt striped like a convict's jersey - Gertrude Stein found the canvas too disturbing to have in the house.

Matisse alarmed the press, the public and the art-world. Younger painters saw him as a menace. The earliest origins of the Matisse myth go back to the gang of ambitious youths clustering round Picasso who mocked the older artist behind his back. They nicknamed him "the Professor" on account of his glasses, and his hopelessly unsuccessful efforts to explain his latest work, which struck them as frankly absurd.

Matisse was 36 years old in 1906 when he first met Picasso, who was 25. But the problem for Picasso's hangers-on was not that Matisse was too old or stodgy. On the contrary, the trouble was that none of them could make head or tail of his profoundly subversive paintings.

They retaliated by sending him up. One of their jokes used Matisse's portrait of his young daughter. The canvas combines the simplicity and freshness of a child's vision with the painter's complex adult feelings for his daughter (whom he had twice nearly lost to accident or illness). But at the time only Picasso grasped the implications of Matisse's use of children's techniques. When Matisse gave him the picture, Picasso's gang played darts with it, crying "A hit! A hit!" whenever one landed on the child's eye or cheek.

Another of their jokes was to paint Matisse's name on posters pasted up on Montmartre urinals in a government campaign to warn against the toxic properties of lead paint. "Painters stay away from Matisse!" ran the posters. "Matisse is more dangerous than alcohol! Matisse drives you mad!" All this was harmless fun to Picasso's gang who knew nothing about Matisse's background, or the reasons that underlay his distress at this point.

Art historians discussing Matisse's early years have tended to reproach him, at least implicitly, for self-pity, a tendency to over-react, and inability to take a joke. Admittedly, he had lived on the breadline since running away from home to be a painter at the age of 20. By 1906 he had endured fifteen years of unrelenting opposition from his family, his teachers and the art establishment as well as public ridicule.

Much of this was no worse than the sufferings of Cezanne or Van Gogh, but there seemed to be an extra virulence to the hatred of Matisse. It was still palpable in his native region of north-eastern France, well over a century after his birth. I soon learned never to mention his name there, at least not to the generation who had grown up hearing him held up as a dreadful warning by their parents. Matisse's brief career at the local art school had ended in public scandal and expulsion in 1891. In 1991, the head of the school told me grimly that Matisse had brought shame and dishonour to their otherwise proud record.

In Bohain-en-Vermandois, the town where Matisse grew up, his memory still rankled. People remembered him as le triple rate, the triple failure who had disgraced his family by being unable to take over his father's business as a seed-merchant; by making a hopeless mess of subsequent attempts to qualify as a lawyer; and finally by his disastrous record as a painter of crude daubs any child could match. He was known in his home town as le sot Matisse (sot means fool or idiot).

I couldn't begin to understand the bitterness behind stories like these until one day I stumbled on the explanation by chance. I spent the next week in a French provincial newspaper library, reading with mounting incredulity about the catastrophe that had engulfed Matisse at the beginning of the century.

It involved his wife's family, the Parayres. Matisse's parents-in-law worked for a wealthy couple called Humbert who disappeared in May, 1902, on the day on which they were publicly exposed as the perpetrators of a huge financial scam. The scandal, which involved many of France's top politicians, bankers and lawyers, threatened not only the government but the judicial and fiscal systems.

A crowd of 10,000 people assembled in the street outside the Humbert's Paris mansion. When they could not be found, Matisse's father-in-law was left to carry the can. His name became a dirty word all over France, especially in the industrial north, where Matisse's parents lived, and where the Humbert Affair left a trail of ruined creditors, bankruptcies and suicides.

For the next two years, Matisse was his family's sole bread-winner. He abandoned his experimental canvases almost overnight to paint portraits and flower paintings in the vain hope they would sell. These years have been labelled "Matisse's dark period" by art historians, who blamed the sudden change in his work on innate prudence or timidity.

The fact is that Matisse did all he could to support his extended family at this time. He had to cope with hostile reporters and editors, prison gaolers (Parayre was imprisoned in the Conciergerie), police (Matisse's studio was searched for incriminating evidence), and lawyers (He organised the defence at the trial which established his father-in-law's innocence). He had no choice but to assume the air of respectability - the neat beard, the dark suit, the serious expression - that have been held against him ever since.

In some ways a reputation for dullness suited Matisse, who emerged from the Humbert Affair with a lifelong horror of exposure. But the consequences of this long-buried secret have been ironic. It was precisely Matisse's intimate acquaintance with misery, humiliation and failure - experiences Picasso never knew - that made him seem the blander of the two. The Matisse legend has long been firmly, perhaps irreversibly entrenched. Whether it is too late now to dig it up and turn it round, only history can say.

The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling, Hamish Hamilton pounds 25