Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  It was one o’clock before we finally got to Vence, then we had to find the house itself, which was outside the village. To keep a distinguished old gentleman waiting is bad enough, but to keep a Frenchman from his lunch!

  We finally found it, and with beating heart I walked up the little path to the front door and rang. It was opened by an extremely handsome but clearly very angry woman. It was Madame Lydia, as we always called her, Lydia Delectorskaya, who had been Matisse’s model and assistant for many years. “You’re late,” she practically hissed at me. I was ready to flee. But then I saw a stocky figure approaching: it was Matisse himself. “You’re late,” he echoed Madame Lydia. Then, mellowing, he said, “Well, as long as you are here, you might as well come in for a moment.”

  At my first visit, he had made the connection with his son Pierre; there had been no mention of Vogue. But now the Vogue connection surfaced alarmingly. “I believe you write for Vogue magazine?” he said. I said indeed I did. “Then you owe me thirty-eight dollars please.” I was dumbfounded. There had been no correspondence about this. I was mystified. “Vogue published a work of mine before the war and never paid me the rights. Thirty-eight dollars please.”

  I mumbled that I had just come from the beach and didn’t have any dollars in my beach bag. “A check will do,” he said. “But I don’t have a checkbook with me.” I was quite distraught. “But I have one,” he said, and went to get it.

  He came back. I was so new in France I had no idea how to make out a check in French. So it was under the dictation of one of the greatest twentieth-century masters that I wrote out that I owed him thirty-eight dollars.

  I noticed that he was watching my pen. It was a new-model Parker that had not yet reached France. “Won’t you try it?” I suggested. He did and liked the way the line would flow smoothly to the left or the right. “Please keep it,” I said. “Un moment.” He went out to get something and came back holding his own pen. “I’ll keep it if you will keep mine.” Then I knew the ice was broken, and I began to breathe in a more normal rhythm. And while he was out of the room, Madame Lydia, obviously mollified by the turn of events, said kindly, “Don’t worry, Monsieur Matisse likes you. I can tell. You will be able to come back.”

  Not wanting to press my advantages, I began backing toward the front door, with Matisse following me. He said, “The best bistro in the region is a quarter of an hour from here. The best dish they make is a bar flambé au fenouil. I’ve reserved your table for you and ordered the bar, so you won’t have to wait when you get there.”

  That summer I was allowed to drop by several times to see Matisse. He would ask me to stand against a white door so that he could look at me. “What have you done for color today?” he would ask.

  Not only was Matisse extremely elegant in his own person—in summer, when not bedridden, he wore loose raw-silk jackets and impeccably cut beige linen trousers—but he had a real interest in fashion. Those portraits of his daughter, Marguerite, wearing a succession of stylish hats were real portraits: of the hats. It might be in the family: Madame Matisse had worked as a milliner to help out family finances in the old days. In 1919, Matisse himself had pinned together a fantastic hat that is mostly an extravagant whirlpool of plumes. He clearly cared for his creation because it appears in some sixteen drawings and three oils.

  Matisse accompanied his wife and daughter when they were choosing dresses; they were friendly with two of Paul Poiret’s sisters, both couturieres, Nicole Groult and Germaine Bongard. He even went to the fittings. Incidentally, Poiret owned two Matisses.

  That autumn, I was back in Paris. A telephonic invitation arrived from Vence. I hurried down, and to my surprise I found the old gentleman in bed, in the middle of the living room. The upper half of him was dressed with his usual formality, again the matching blue sweater and tie, the beard immaculately trimmed, hands manicured, gold-rimmed specs.

  “I can’t stand up to work anymore,” he said cheerfully, “so I had my bed moved to the largest room of the house.”

  There was a colored rug on the bed; the foot of the bed ended in red metal arabesques; there was a red rose in a glass by his side: all very Matisse. And a typical note of convenience and order: next to the bed was a piece of furniture he had designed himself—a combination bookcase and a series of drawers on a pivot that he could swing around to reach what he wanted. Outside each drawer he had drawn in white chalk what was inside.

  A whole forest of short flowers in an army of small vases covered several tables. And almost his signature: a large philodendron plant.

  A board lay across his knees, and he was wielding a large pair of scissors over a heap of colored papers. Above his head was a series of bold black ink-brush drawings of his granddaughter Jackie.

  Across from him, near the fireplace, was the striped red-and-white armchair that we recognize from many of his paintings.

  Reflected in the mirror behind him were colored leaf shapes climbing up strips of brown paper. They were why he had summoned me. I will explain.

  Obviously enjoying my surprise (he was not known to be a practicing Catholic), he told me, “I am going to design a chapel.” It was thanks to his great kindness that I wrote the first story anywhere of Matisse’s chapel in Vence. He told me how it had come about.

  During the war he was gravely ill. Both his estranged wife and his daughter were away, in the Resistance. He was nursed with admirable devotion by a young woman named Monique Bourgeois. She put off following her vocation, to become a nun, until he was out of danger. Only then did she exchange her nurse’s uniform for the Dominican veil.

  A deep friendship had developed between Matisse and Sœur Jacques-Marie, as she was now called. She came back for occasional visits. She liked to talk about her watercolors, and one time she gave him a little album of minute painted landscapes. When he showed her some of his own work, she apologized hesitantly: “Well … the colors are very pretty, but it is not exactly the kind of thing I like.” Matisse was pleased at her frankness and said, “You are the only person who tells me the truth.”

  Matisse moved from the Nice apartment to Vence. By an extraordinary coincidence, Sœur Jacques-Marie also came to Vence, to a convent near her old friend. She found the nuns talking about projects for a new chapel. Aspiring to design one of the future stained-glass windows, she made a tentative watercolor. She was not happy with the results. She took her sketch over to Matisse to get his advice.

  Matisse kindly made some suggestions. He sent for some sheets of colored cellophane so she could cut them out to her design and judge the effect. By the time the sheets of cellophane had arrived, the two Dominican monks in charge of planning the new chapel had also arrived—Father Couturier, a familiar figure in art circles, and Brother Rayssiguier—and Matisse’s imagination had caught fire.

  He had become completely fascinated with the problem of designing stained-glass windows. The two monks obviously seized a golden opportunity and encouraged him. Matisse offered to design first one, then all the windows, then the decoration of the interior, then the walls themselves. The monks happily gave up their original plans, and Matisse took over the entire project.

  He had a cardboard model of the future chapel, with bands of cellophane to represent the future stained-glass windows: “The windows will run from floor to ceiling, fifteen feet high. They will be made of pure color shapes, very brilliant. No figures. Just the pattern of the shapes. Imagine when the sun pours through the glass—it will throw colored reflections on the white floor and walls. A whole orchestra of color!” He thought of the strong Midi sunlight almost as an element of building.

  For the maquettes of the future windows, Matisse, in his precise professorial manner, explained his technique. First he paints sheets of paper with intense, flat color, then with a large pair of scissors he cuts out a shape. Many have a leaflike pattern. Madame Lydia, under his direction, pins them onto the strips of paper representing the future windows.

  “The only decoration inside
the church will be black and white. You will see how the intensity of a single black line can balance the impact of the colored windows.”

  He pointed out on the model: “On this side I will have a drawing of the Virgin and Child surrounded by flowers. Over here will be Stations of the Cross. Here will be Father Couturier—I mean Saint Dominic—Father Couturier posed for the drawings, so I always get confused.”

  Father Couturier described to me posing for the Saint Dominic figure. He sat in Matisse’s studio for over an hour, chatting while the artist made sketch after sketch in charcoal. Matisse himself talked constantly while he worked. Suddenly the atmosphere changed. Matisse became tense and silent. His assistant appeared holding drawing implements with the gravity of a nurse assisting a surgeon. Almost holding his breath, Matisse made a few decisive lines on a fresh paper. This was the final drawing of the series, the accumulation of experience gathered during the hour.

  Matisse had to devise a special technique to execute the wall drawings—they are huge—and he couldn’t leave his bed. He explained, “I will draw on squares of white tile which have been cooked once, then coated with a special preparation. After I have drawn on them, they will be baked again, setting the line permanently.

  “These squares will be small, so easy to handle. When finished, they will be spread over the walls, giving an alive surface.

  “What you see here are only working sketches—I make a great many in preparation—then the final drawing will be made directly on the tiles. I draw a subject over and over again until I really feel it in my hands.”

  He noticed that I was looking at a large sketch of a girl’s head drawn right on the living room door. “I did that blindfolded. After working from the model all morning, I wanted to see if I really had it. I was blindfolded and led to the door.” It looked almost as free and sure as the other sketches.

  I mentioned a documentary film I had seen with Matisse actually sketching. “There was a passage showing me drawing in slow motion,” he said. “Before my pencil ever touched the paper, my hand made a strange journey of its own. I never realized before that I did this. I suddenly felt as if I were shown naked—that everyone could see this—it made me deeply ashamed. You must understand,” he insisted, “this was not hesitation. I was unconsciously establishing the relationship between the subject I was about to draw and the size of my paper. I had not yet begun to sing. [Je n’avais pas encore commencé à chanter.]”

  Matisse told me he was going to make “a church full of gaiety—a place which will make people happy.” The numerous people who now crowd their way into Sainte Marie du Rosaire, as Matisse’s chapel is called (be sure to make reservations: there is only room for ninety people), will undoubtedly feel he succeeded.

  Matisse cared about the way the line of a drawing flowed across the page, and he also cared about how the written word flowed across the page. I was fortunate to receive several notes from him, which I cherish. They show a definite wish to establish a harmonious relationship between the space between the lines and the lines themselves.

  The envelopes are stamped with the Nice postmark: “Nice Ses Jardins, Son Soleil, Ses Fêtes.” How appropriate for Matisse’s world.

  Most unexpectedly, when I married in 1948, he sent me a formal engraved visiting card (hard to imagine that Picasso would ever have such a thing), on which he wished me “complete and unlimited happiness.” It didn’t quite work out like that, but I was happy to have his good wishes.

  Matisse loved reading, poetry in particular. He was a natural for marrying images with text. But he was sixty years old before anyone asked him to illustrate a book. The first time it happened was in 1930, when Albert Skira invited him to illustrate the poems of Mallarmé, a great favorite of Matisse’s.

  One of the poems was about a swan. Typical of Matisse’s thoroughgoing serious approach to any task, he hired a boat at the Bois de Boulogne and went out on the lake to sketch the swans from life. A photograph records him sitting bolt upright in the boat, pad on knee, formal hat on head.

  Swans are notoriously bad-tempered creatures. The great artist wasn’t spared their irascibility. One of his models swiveled around, hissing alarmingly.

  I learned of Matisse’s thoughts about balancing an image and text from the master himself on another occasion. He had telephoned me in Paris and asked me to come down to Vence. He managed to make the sun shine steadily for his odalisques. They could loll around in the thinnest veiling without a shiver. But it was November and piercingly cold. He could stay wrapped up cozily in bed, but the visitor—me—had to rely on layers of wool jersey.

  He had prepared a marvelous feast for me. He had set out all the books he had illustrated, and he pointed out one example after another to show exactly why and how he had solved certain problems in what he called the “ornamentation” of a book. As he explained it, he saw no difference between building a book and building a painting. It was a question of balancing a light page (the text) and a dark page (the illustration).

  In the case of Mallarmé, the problem was to place a full-page illustration opposite a few airy lines of text without weighing them down. The answer was to make etchings done in a very thin, even line, without shading, that would leave the illustrated page almost as white as before the etching was printed. The illustration floats over the whole page, without a margin, so that the page stays light, because the design is not, as usual, massed toward the center.

  The problem was exactly the opposite in illustrating Montherlant’s Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos. What to do so that the heavy black lines used to illustrate the poem didn’t pull down the rather empty page of text? His solution was to make one margin surrounding both pages, and then to accentuate the text on each page by making the top letter red. He said when he had seen the first proofs, in which red had not been used, he found the result “a little funereal.” The red made the balance he was seeking. He looked at the page and held it up for me: “Red, black, white—pas mal.”

  He spent years illustrating a great edition of Ronsard, the sixteenth-century French poet who wrote so eloquently about love. Matisse worked on this, the Florilège des Amours (published in 1948), with a care and precision that are hard to imagine. He chose the poems himself and functioned as his own layout man. A series of albums in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris shows all the different stages he went through.

  He tried and rejected many typefaces. He tried and rejected several kinds of paper. He modified and re-modified his own designs. Finally, 126 tender lithographs were produced. It is a glorious book. Sometimes his ornamentation would be just a grace note to the text. Sometimes he would throw an illustration over most of the page, leaving only a few lines of the poem.

  I happened to be with him when Albert Skira, the publisher, delivered the first copy. His expression of delight was very moving. I own what I believe to be the only photograph of Matisse beaming. On another occasion he had said, “Can’t one retain a young and ardent imagination? I feel better equipped to illustrate Ronsard’s love poetry now than when I was twenty-five. Then, I didn’t need imagination.”

  Another visitor to Le Rêve, in 1946, was Pablo Picasso. Matisse’s relations with Picasso were affectionate but guarded. Matisse had been delighted when he heard that Picasso had bought his sumptuous Still Life with Oranges, of 1912, during the war. He wrote to his son Pierre, “Picasso is very proud of it.” In a most unusual tribute from one artist to another, Picasso chose to exhibit it along with his most recent work at the first Salon d’Automne after the war. Oranges were to Matisse something like apples to Cézanne. He painted them, but also occasionally sent baskets to his friends.

  Matisse recorded Picasso’s 1946 visit to Vence with his new companion, Françoise Gilot, in a letter to his son (quoted from John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son):

  Dear Pierre,

  Three or four days ago, Picasso came to see me with a very pretty young woman. He could not have been more friendly, and he said he would come back and ha
ve a lot of things to tell me.

  He hasn’t come back. He saw what he wanted to see—my works in cut paper, my new paintings, the painted door etc. That’s all that he wanted. He will put it all to good use in time. Picasso is not straightforward. Everyone has known that for the last forty years.

  Picasso was far from enthusiastic about the chapel. Anything to do with the Church was off-limits as far as he was concerned. However, he did admire the chasubles, designed from cut-paper elements, and suggested that Matisse design capes for bullfighters.

  When the Communist writer Louis Aragon came to call, the maquette of the chapel was on a table. Aragon resolutely ignored it. As he got up to leave, Matisse almost shouted at him, “If you don’t look at my chapel, I will throw my shoe at you.”

  Matisse moved back to Cimiez from Vence in late 1949. His rooms at Le Rêve were too small to display the designs of the stained-glass windows. Putting his two rooms together at the Hôtel Régina gave him the exact dimensions of the chapel. In an untypically jocular vein, he said to Brother Rayssiguier, the Dominican monk in charge of the chapel construction, “I’m sleeping in the church again.”

  I found another personal note from Matisse, in looking over his correspondence with Brother Rayssiguier. He apologizes for a large blot of ink, then adds, “Let me try to turn it into something that will give you pleasure.” And he has added flower petals around the blot. December 4, 1949.

  Another nugget, this from Father Couturier’s diary: “He tells me he definitely prefers El Greco to Velázquez, who is too perfect, too skillful. He’s like a gorgeous fabric. A very beautiful marble. But in El Greco there is soul everywhere, even in the legs of Saint Martin’s horse.” July 25, 1951.

  In spite of very poor health, Matisse managed to oversee all the exhausting details of the decoration of Sainte Marie du Rosaire. He even climbed up scaffolding. Begun in 1948, it took up all his time and flagging energy. It was consecrated in 1951. As he said himself: “A crowning achievement.”