The Missing Matisse

by Pierre H. Matisse

  “Your mother was a true artist,” he said.

  On to drawing five.

  Standing by a charming balcony, an enchanting lady is dreaming about love. There is a clock on the wall beneath her that reads nine o’clock sharp. Maybe she is waiting for her suitor to arrive. She will have to wait with the others as I set her aside.

  Aha, a lovely lady is fanning herself in front of me. She is wearing a long dress with crinolines that add volume to the skirt, which is decorated with hearts. There are two beaux courting her—which one will she choose? They both accompany her to the stack of finished drawings.

  “You are moving right along this morning,” Grandfather remarks, adding, “Simple—with no hesitation.”

  Only one more character left. I’ve saved him for last because I feel a kinship to him these days.

  A harlequin, full of joie de vivre, is dancing in front of me. This exuberant little fellow obviously likes jazz. Is he going to a masquerade ball? As he rushes away, he waves his scarf at me. The three debutantes are waiting for him, and he must go.

  “Well done,” I seem to hear the harlequin call out.

  “Well done,” Grandfather echoes him.

  I am finished.

  Grandfather has a twinkle in his eye and says with a good-natured chuckle, “Haven’t you forgotten something, Pierre?”

  “I only planned seven pieces in the suite.”

  He gives me a knowing smile. Of course. I pick up the charcoal and sign each piece Pierre Henri Matisse. My tribute to Maman and my grandfather is complete. (You can see photos of these seven drawings when you click on “Tribute” at www.themissingmatisse.com.)

  Grandfather Matisse nods, then says, “So now you know the secret to the source of your inspiration. God is truly the source of all divine creative inspiration, something I learned late in life when I began designing the Vence Chapel.”

  Smiling, he continues, “That project was my greatest joy. It allowed me to work and serve God. Imagine the privilege of working with the heavenly Master. What a wonderment! What joy.” And then he fades away.

  A week later, I start sketching spontaneously, without any particular direction. Suddenly, I have an unexpected visitor on my page—a warrior. An angel warrior, the archangel Michael. Just like it happened with The Gift, an image takes shape before the story.

  Will there be more angels to come? Possibly. Certain pieces are divinely inspired, and others are not, and I understand the difference. Every day I work as an artist, but I only take commission work from God.

  In some ways, this book may be considered one of those commissions from Him. For years, I have felt inspired to write my story. I knew I needed to fill in the details of my life for posterity. There have been moments when it has been painful to revisit the haunting memories, while at other times I have been liberated as I put down the words.

  As I’ve said, Jean Matisse, the only father I’ve ever known, taught me about love by example. Because of that, I’ve chosen to continue my fight to honor his memory and the love he gave me by whatever means I have available to me. I am still hopeful that a DNA test will prove whether or not he is my biological father.

  No matter what the evidence may reveal, I have a heavenly Father and an assurance deep in my soul of my spiritual DNA.

  The best is yet to come . . .

  Acknowledgments

  THIS MEMOIR has been a journey back in time, and I would like to thank all those who have helped along the way to make it possible:

  Eddie Adams Dr. Thomas Beaver Susan Stauffer Beckman

  Larry Freirich Laura Holland Cody Holland

  John and Chrys Howard Scott and Sharon Leahy

  Daniel Leroy Willie and Korie Robertson

  Bernie Roseaur Linda Spagnoli Judie Stack.

  And Shirley Rose, our la femme à tout faire.

  And for our team of new friends at Tyndale House Publishers:

  Jan Long Harris Bonne Steffen Dean Renninger

  Sharon Leavitt Jillian Schlossberg Nancy Clausen

  Cassidy Gage Margie Watterson Sarah Kelley

  “The labourer is worthy of his reward.”

  1 TIMOTHY 5:18, KJV

  Endnotes

  xi My father, Jean Matisse, is a sculptor Jean Matisse was the oldest son of Henri Matisse. He followed his father’s artistic lead by becoming a sculptor, although he never achieved the acclaim that Grandfather Matisse did. During World War II, he was an active participant in the French resistance against the Nazis and, as you’ve read, included me on some of those adventures.

  xi my mother, Louise Milhau Matisse My mother was a painter, a ceramist, and decorator who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and from a very young age I assisted her in whatever way I could. She was always in demand, busy with commissioned work, even during the war.

  xii my grandfather—Henri Matisse—the master of color The artist I knew as my grandfather was born to a seed merchant, but came from a long line of weavers who had been creating textiles for generations. After studying law, Grandfather, at age twenty, took up painting when his mother gave him a box of colors to pass the time during a long convalescence from appendicitis. He gave up law and moved to Paris to take up art full time. Grandfather’s breakthrough as an artist came during the summers of 1904–1905, when he was staying and painting on the French Riviera, where the light compelled him to capture its intensity on the canvas with bright, bold colors that were emotionally explosive to the eyes. At Paris’s fall salon in 1905, which showcased new artists, Grandfather’s paintings were shocking, and he was labeled a fauve (wild beast). The sensationalism of fauvism lasted only a few years, and it didn’t deter Grandfather from continuing to make a lasting statement with his creations. His body of work over a half-century included paintings, sculptures, drawings, lithographs, and cutouts, among other pieces.

  6 a family friend Monsieur Pablo Picasso Grandfather Matisse first met Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso in 1906 in Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, and they became lifelong friends and artistic rivals. They exchanged art and inspired one another. One word that aptly describes Picasso is bohemian, albeit, he was a famous and prolific one when it came to producing art. Because of his fame, Picasso was untouchable to the Nazis even after they occupied France, and he remained in Paris while other artists fled. He was the co creator of cubism with Georges Braque, but Picasso never stopped experimenting, putting his own stylistic flair on anything—and everything—he tried.

  8 sculptor Aristide Maillol Maillol began his career as a painter and tapestry designer, but when the intricate work of tapestry-making threatened his eyesight, he turned exclusively to sculpture. In his creations, Maillol balanced the real, human characteristics of his models with the eternal, stylized forms of Greek and Roman sculpture.

  20 howitzer, Big Bertha Although most Parisians thought it was Big Bertha that was bombing the city during World War I, this famous Krupp gun’s fixed target was Belgium. The long-range siege gun used against the City of Light was another Krupp weapon—the Paris Gun. It was capable of hurling a 210-pound shell up to eighty-one miles with an altitude of more than twenty-five miles, the first human-made object to reach the stratosphere.

  28 Monsieur Picasso’s mural Guernica Guernica is a town in the Basque area of Spain, which during the Spanish Civil War, was one of the bastions of the Republican-resistance movement against the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco. On April 26, 1937, German warplanes bombed Guernica for about two hours. Hitler supported Franco and was using the conflict in Spain to test new weapons. Picasso had already been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to do a piece for the 1937 Paris Exposition. When he learned what had happened to Guernica, he scrapped his original idea and in less than a month finished the antiwar mural. When the Nazis occupied France, they visited Picasso to take an inventory of his “degenerate” art. The Boche officer saw the huge mural and said, “You did that?” to which the artist answered, “No, y
ou did.”

  39 “He is Pierre Matisse, like me?” My uncle Pierre, the younger son of Grandfather Matisse, started out as a painter but embarked on a new career in his early twenties as an art dealer in New York City. Once established, Pierre not only showcased his father’s work and the works of family friends such as Picasso and Braque among many others, but also introduced Americans to prominent artists such as Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, and Jean Dubuffet.

  45 People call this la drôle de guerre or the Funny War. The English called it the Phony War, a seven-month period of time from September 1939 to April 1940. France and Great Britain had declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939, after Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, but no offensive action was taken against the Nazis during these months. In April 1940, Hitler’s army occupied Norway and on May 10, invaded Holland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with France in its crosshairs. That same day, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlin as England’s prime minister, promising his country that they would never surrender to Nazi Germany.

  55 “In 1643, at the Battle of Rocroi during the Thirty Years’ War, General Condé” The general Tata was referring to was Louis II of Bourbon, a twenty-one-year-old duke who would later become the fourth prince of Condé. He led 23,000 men against the Spanish invaders at Rocroi, the first defeat on land of the Spanish army in more than a century.

  86 “Toulouse,” Papa says, which means to Grandmother Amélie Matisse. Amélie Parayre met Grandfather at a wedding in 1897, and even though he had no money of his own, her parents approved of the match, and they married in 1898. Amélie had a gift for designing and making hats for a fashionable clientele and opened her own hat shop a year and a half later with a partner, providing needed income. When Grandfather’s work started being noticed, she began having fits of anxiety that took a toll on their marriage over the years, leading to their separation in March 1939.

  87 her inseparable daughter, Marguerite Marguerite was Grandfather’s daughter by one of his models before he met and married Amélie. Even though Amélie had trouble connecting with her own two sons, she loved Marguerite as her own child.

  121 artist Salvador Dali Born in the Catalonian region of Spain, Dali became part of the Paris scene in 1929 with a one-man show. He initially was a leader of the surrealist movement, marked by his famous work featuring the melting watches, The Persistence of Memory. When the Nazis occupied Bordeaux in 1940, Dali and his wife, Gala, escaped to the United States, returning to Spain in 1948.

  121 One painter whose stories I enjoy is Maurice de Vlaminck Another of the fauvism painters, along with Grandfather and André Derain, Vlaminck was a self-taught artist, who over his lifetime was a musician, actor, racing cyclist, illustrator, and novelist too.

  121 But my favorite family friend is Jean Effel His real name was François Lejeune, but he went by his nom de plume Jean Effel. He was a caricaturist, illustrator, and journalist, celebrated for his illustrated series, The Creation of the World.

  151 The Great and her daughter, Marguerite, will be arrested In April 1944, Marguerite Matisse Duthuit was arrested by the Nazis in northwestern France and sent to prison. She had been crisscrossing France by railroad, as a courier, and was picked up in Rennes. After being interrogated and tortured in prison, she was put on board a train headed to a concentration camp in Germany. As luck would have it, an air raid alert caused the train to make an unscheduled stop in open country. The French conductors opened the doors and said to their passengers, “Jump, and run for it!” Marguerite managed to get away, hiding out in the wooded countryside until France was liberated a few months later. Amélie Matisse’s resistance activities were primarily done in Paris. Not long after Marguerite’s arrest, the Gestapo had taken Marguerite’s clothes and cleverly dressed a female Nazi conspirator in them. The imposter also had Marguerite’s key to her mother’s apartment which, when she let herself in, surprised Amélie and revealed evidence of her work for the underground. She spent six months in prison until Paris was liberated.

  331 something I learned later in life when I began designing the Vence Chapel In 1941, Grandfather had undergone serious surgery and moved to Vence on the French Riveria from 1943 to 1949, during which time he employed a young nurse, Monique Bourgeois, who would later become a Dominican nun. Bourgeois had confided to Grandfather her wish to decorate a prayer room in their convent. Instead, Grandfather designed an entire chapel, working for four years on every detail involved—from the building, stained glass windows, ceramics, and even the priest’s vestment. He considered it his masterpiece. In her book, Matisse: The Chapel at Vence, author Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Seligny quotes Grandfather during his time living in Vence. “I go every morning to say my prayers, pencil in hand; I stand in front of a pomegranate tree covered in blossom, each flower at a different stage, and I watch their transformation. Not in fact in any spirit of scientific enquiry, but filled with admiration for the work of God. Is this not a way of praying? And I act in such a way (although basically I do nothing myself as it is God who guides my hand) as to make the tenderness of my heart accessible to others.”

  Maman, Louise, working at the kiln of the Matisse estate in Clamart, a Paris suburb

  My beloved Tata

  My dear friend Bouboule and me (age three) outside Maman’s studio. We stayed out of trouble when I was busy as her assistant.

  At age nine, I dressed up for this photo-booth portrait taken by Tata at the 1937 World’s Fair.

  Grandfather Henri Matisse in his home/studio in Nice, where Maman and I would visit and I went for a color lesson.

  In January 1948, I sailed from Marseille to Algeria to join my commando paratrooper unit to fulfill my military duty. The first test was getting 800 men and a herd of seasick cows there safely, through a terrible storm.

  Many of my days in the military were spent learning how and preparing to jump out of airplanes during commando operations. The parachutes we used were very dangerous. Today, they are referred to as “suicide parachutes” because you cannot control them.

  A practice jump from a reclaimed German Junker (above). Thankfully, I landed in one piece (below).

  Jeanne and me on our wedding day, September 23, 1995

  Swingin’ in the Rain is a part of the collection We’ll Always Have Paris, inspired by Jeanne’s and my favorite movie, Casablanca. I began this series with a painting, which I gave her on our first anniversary. To this day, I continue to create many images in many mediums, courting Jeanne artistically through my pre–World War II Paris—all part of our ongoing love story.

  I channeled my inner Matisse in Making Your Mark, the first abstract cutout I ever created. It’s signed in all four corners, allowing the collector to participate in the art by deciding which way to display it.

  Wanting to paint wherever inspiration struck, I designed my own traveling easel. Photo taken in our backyard, 1996.

  In 1998, I was fortunate to meet Prince and Princess Takamado of the Japanese Imperial Family (on the far left) and present them with this cutout, O Japan, Land of Beauty, which they accepted on behalf of UNICEF.

  I designed this poster for Make Music America, raising money to purchase instruments for children across the nation who couldn’t afford them. Jeanne and I are passionate about contributing art to charities and organizations that are making a difference in the world.

  In 2000, Jeanne and I were in Las Vegas for a millennium art show. As part of our outreach to children, I conducted a hands-on workshop with the Clark County Schools gifted students’ program. I designed a cutout, which the children helped me create and assemble. Then we each signed the finished work. I wanted them to understand and experience the joy they can generate by using their art to give to others. The finished artwork (below) was donated to the Sunrise Children’s Hospital.

  I was honored to be the painting instructor for my Duck Commander friends in Season 8 of Duck Dynasty. We all agreed Si was the perfect model.

  Me and Si, wearing two of my fav
orite hats

  After confirming my faith in Jesus Christ, I was baptized by Willie Robertson. Assisted by his wife, Korie, I emerged a “new Matisse.”

  Me in my studio, where visions become reality

  I created this cutout, Living Waters, with the idea of using the image to raise funds for children’s health organizations, before I even knew the true living water of my Savior, Jesus Christ. He said, “Those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life” (John 4:14).