With one Paris exhibition on the French modern master coming to a close and another yet to open in Nice, Charles Miller reflects on the extraordinary influence Matisse’s daughter had on her father’s life and work
Self Portrait, (1900), brush with India ink on paper
Last year marked the seventieth anniversary of the death of the twentieth century’s greatest ‘modern’ master, Henri Matisse (1869-1954). That anniversary, like his neglected grave in Cimiez, Nice, was disregarded in the world of art exhibitions nor did it prompt a any retrospective event or publication. My own book, The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse. Vence’s Chapel of the Rosary (Unicorn, 2024), was published with the anniversary year in the background, and Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton mounted a fascinating exhibition, ‘Matisse: The Red Studio’, bringing together as many of the extant paintings and artefacts that Matisse depicted in the remarkable, programmatic L’Atelier rouge (‘The Red Studio’) of 1911 together with documentary evidence that set the work in context.
Henri, wife Amélie and Marguerite in the studio in Collioure (1907)
That largely missed opportunity notwithstanding, the round of exhibitions and publications about Henri Matisse is unstoppable. In 2022-3 the Philadelphia Art Museum partnered with the Musée de L’Orangerie, Paris, to mount ‘Matisse in the 1930s’, followed in 2023-4 by ‘Vertigo of Color. Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism’, a joint effort by New York’s Metropolitan Museum and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Taken together, they offered rich surveys of two important phases in the artist’s evolution: ‘Vertigo’ plotting Matisse’s journey to sudden notoriety as ‘il fauvissimo’ (the leader of the so-called fauves or ‘wild beasts’) and ‘Matisse in the 1930s’ plotting the artist’s attempts to find his distinctive voice again in a changed art world – he had turned 60 on 31 December, 1929 – and after forty years at the creative coalface. Both exhibitions were concerned with formal issues related chiefly to his canvas and mural painting, but the fine catalogue of ‘Matisse in the 1930s’ included a somewhat unexpected entry: an essay entitled ‘Lydia Delektorskaya and the Making of Matisse’. Its importance lay in turning attention away from Matisse’s art per se – one wonders how much more critical analysis it can meaningfully bear – and toward the human and relational context which was key to the remarkable streams of inspiration which accompanied, even drove, him almost until the day of his death. The essay gave readers the benefit of careful research into Lydia’s own background and character as well as her unique yet changing relationship with Matisse through the last quarter century of his life. During those years, we learn, how key was her role on the practical level as studio assistant, secretary and factotum, but also as his muse, that is, as a source of creative inspiration, energy and output.
Marguerite Sleeping, Étretat (1920), oil on canvas, 46 x 65.5 cm (Private Collection)
But Matisse’s relationship with Lydia Delektorskaya in its richness and impact as in its layers of ambiguity was not the first, nor the longest, nor the most important. Before Lydia and throughout his life there was his daughter and eldest child Marguerite (‘Margot’). In different ways, one overt and another covert, two 2025 exhibitions reveal Marguerite’s importance not only as a generative muse for her father but as ‘an essential element in the making of Matisse’s universe’.
Marguerite, Nice, (1921), India ink on paper, 35.5 x 26.6 cm (Private Collection)
The first exhibition, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, ‘Matisse and Marguerite: A Father’s Regard’ (ending at time of writing, alas, but the fine catalogue remains available: ISBN 978-2-7596-0602-3), is huge in scope and insights. Through a remarkable assemblage of oeuvres, together with documents evidencing key moments in their shared artistic sojourn through life as father and daughter, the exhibition gives voice to a relationship which, to non-specialists’ ears at least, has been voiceless: the voice of the artist-father to his beloved daughter (‘My little girl’) and of the admiring daughter to her father (‘the girl who adores you and the being who loves your work’). What was doubtless important and unique for Matisse (who was always wary of the sycophantic tendencies in others) was the character of their relationship as it grew and deepened through the course of years into one of equality, intellectual engagement, honest expression of views, and deep mutual love – all fashioned in the fire of the complex relationship between father and daughter, master and assistant.
Marguerite with the Black Cat, Issy-les-Moulineaux (1910), oil on canvas, 94 x 64 cm (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris)
The exhibition’s content is remarkable: 45 oils on canvas, mostly of Marguerite but a few by Marguerite herself, 68 drawings in charcoal, crayon, pencil and India ink, and numerous sculptures. Especially relevant to the subtle synergy between the two current exhibitions are the drawings of Marguerite. They reveal ‘Margot’ in her moods, in the evolving construction of her inner self and its outward visage with a richness and subtlety that largely elude the canvases. Admittedly, many of the drawings are studies for the canvases, but that is precisely what makes them richer: the artist’s multiple attempts to capture the inner being of his subject. That highlights the importance of drawing for Matisse, so for most viewers, I suspect, their dominating presence in the exhibition will surprise. Years ago critic Waldemar George observed that Matisse was ‘helpless’ against his reputation as the master of ‘chromatic pigments’, that is, as a colourist. A master of colour he certainly was, but not to the exclusion of drawing as the ‘door’ (Jean Cassou) through which the artist ‘one-ed’ himself’ with his subject and zero-ed in on its essence which was the pictorial goal. His final drawing ‘Marguerite lisant’ in preparation for an oil by the same name captured the demure, serious innocence of eight-year old Margot during a happy summer sojourn in Collioure in 1906.
Marguerite, Collioure (1906-1907), oil on canvas, 65.1 x 54 cm (Musée National Picasso, Paris)
Among the last drawings of Marguerite in the exhibition aretwo dated January 1945. Although drawn within days of one another they witness to a father’s horrified reaction to Marguerite’s experience of capture, torture, failed suicide and eventual release in August 1944. Marguerite had joined an arm of the Résistance in early winter 1943 and was denounced then captured in Rennes in mid-April. She was on the infamous deportation ‘train de Langeais’ when unexpectedly released in Belfort. When she finally saw her father in Vence in January 1945 she narrated her experiences to her shocked father. He was devastated by her vivid revelations and his irrepressible drive to draw her failed him – almost. Of the two charcoal drawings he managed to complete, the first is unique in Matisse’s vast artistic output: a shadowy, almost ghoulish, vacant face, drawn by a hand whose trembling we can almost feel. What is important about the drawing, though, is not its formal characteristics but its witness to Matisse’s unavoidable confrontation with violence, pain, punishment, abuse and, in Margot’s case, near death. As she spoke, he himself was drawn into her tragedy in painful paternal empathy. The episode and its images make for a sobering near-end to a ground-breaking exhibition.
Marguerite Reading, Collioure (1906), oil on canvas, 64.5 x 80.3 cm (Musée de Grenoble)
Preparatory drawing for the above, Collioure (1906), ink on paper, 39.7 x 51.1 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
“What is important about the drawing, though, is not its formal characteristics but its witness to Matisse’s unavoidable confrontation with violence, pain, punishment, abuse and, in Margot’s case, near death...”
If ‘Matisse and Marguerite’ offers that overt witness to the impact of a daughter on her father’s art, a soon-to-open exhibition at Nice’s Musée Matisse, ‘Henri Matisse. Chemin de Croix – Dessiner la Passion’ (1 October – 19 January 2026), offers what I would call a covert witness. In addition to the straightforward goal of making the Chemin de croix in Vence’s Dominican Chapel of the Rosary better known as perhaps the most imposing ceramic panel in a sacred space where the stained glass dominates the visual field, the exhibition also highlights and explains the distinctive character of the Chemin line drawings (in black paint on glazed ceramic tiles) as compared with the chapel’s other two drawings (Virgin and Child and St Dominic), sinuous, even elegant and from which the final Chemin drawings so strikingly diverge.
Marguerite, Vence (22 January, 1945), charcoal on paper, 48 x 37 cm (Private Collection) and Marguerite, Vence (January, 1945), charcoal on paper, 48 x 37 cm (Private Collection)
As in the Paris exhibition, the Nice exhibition will lay before the viewer an extensive visual feast: 84 preparatory drawings for the 14 ‘stations’ tracking the Passion of Christ from his judgment before Pilate to his entombment. Matisse was forthright about the importance of preparatory sketches. ‘Artists need to make sketches, always. Whenever there is time, they must sketch. Sketch anything. The subject does not matter’ (quoted by Riichiro Kawashima). As regards the preparatory drawings for the Chemin, each series of preparatory sketches underwent a unrelenting simplification, one could almost say desiccation, of each of the 14 scenes. Robust, shaded and modelled drawings in pencil, ink or charcoal, became what, in the end, fills the east wall of the chapel. Those who tracked his preparatory drawings were shocked at where the design process led Matisse: line drawings in a kind of scrawl or graffiti.
Virgin with Child and The Way of the Cross, Chapel of the Rosary, Vence (1951), Ceramic murals; photo BAMSRodella. Note Station 6, ‘Veronica’s Veil’, in its final, much reduced form.
Matisse’s gilded altar crucifix and candle sticks with tabernacle cover aligned with the central image, Station 12, of the Crucified on the Chapel’s east wall; photo BAMSRodella
There is, for sure, a huge interpretive question there. The ‘Why?’ is easiest to answer. The artist’s serious meditations on each scene drew him into what he called ‘the profoundest human drama’, a drama which led Matisse far from the artistic aim he had declared decades before: an art like a ‘comfortable armchair’! (‘Notes of a Painter’ [1908]). The trickier question is the ‘How?’. If, as Pierre Schneider argued in his vast study Matisse, the artist’s genius involved a kind of psychic one-ing of himself with his subject – ‘If you want to paint a tree, you must become a tree!’, Matisse once declared to his art students – then a satisfactory interpretation of the final form of the Chemin de croix need explanation. How did Matisse manage to one himself with the subject of Christ’s Passion so as to render it in such a powerful way?
Matisse at work on studies for the Chapel murals in his apartment at the Régina, Cimiez, Nice (1949); photo (possibly) Hélène Adant
Marguerite, I suggest, is the answer. The personal ‘passion’ she experienced in 1944 and then related to her father in January 1945, provided Matisse with a way in to the drama of Christ’s Passion, let’s call it the existential opening by which he could one himself with so foreign a subject matter for his art. Horror at his daughter’s sufferings, and pride in her eventual surmounting of the iniquity marshalled against her, enabled him to one himself with the drama in Jerusalem so many centuries before. At no point in Matisse’s artistic career had his own self-directed interests led him to confrontation with the ‘shadow side’ of reality. His canvases, remember, had no shadows! In drawing the scenes of the Passion, though, avoidance was no longer possible. Beyond that, though, the fact that Marguerite not only survived but emerged from her ‘passion’ with what Matisse’s friend Christian Zervos described as a ‘supernatural beauty’, enabled Matisse to use even an attenuated means to cast the Passion of Christ as life-giving triumph – perhaps Matisse’s most remarkable achievements in his Chemin de croix. The chapel commission forced Matisse to face life’s ‘shadow side’ and its transformative potential. In a commission which he regarded as the ‘crowning’ of his life’s work, Marguerite, his ‘little girl’, was the hidden muse and drawing was his means. ‘My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion. The simplicity of the medium allows that.’ A question, then, is posed as we await the opening of this newest Matisse exhibition. Will its curator take viewers behind the ranks of charcoal and line drawings and the evolution of their form? Will he explain how the greatest practitioner of the arabesque, the decorative ‘living line’, became a graffiti artist of the Passion of Christ? We wait to see.
