An artistic master with an iron will to match

Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse -- The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954
By Hilary Spurling
Knopf, 544 pp., illustrated, $40

Hilary Spurling considers Matisse the greatest artist of the 20th century. The story she tells in her biography, now completed in its second volume, is of his heroic, obsessive dedication to art. ''The effort took everything he had to give."

Matisse could not have done it without a wife who was willing to endure a self-sacrificing life of poverty. ''Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more," he told his wife-to-be, who accepted this condition instantly. Spurling says, ''He gave her the cause she had been waiting for from girlhood."

Everything in their household revolved around painting; his art drew everyone around him into it. ''Matisse's canvases represented stability, continuity, and cohesion for the whole family. . . . The work remained a bulwark." Matisse was not at heart a bourgeois, but he knew the value of a materially stable, if not tranquil, home.

Matisse's greatest strength was that he was unbiddable. He may even have been unteachable. Spurling portrays Matisse as obsessed, always working, always struggling. ''Where willpower isn't enough, I'll tell you the trick, you have to fall back on stubbornness instead," he wrote an artist friend. Matisse's willpower is all the more amazing when you learn that whenever he showed his work in public -- to the end -- people responded with outrage. ''Matisse himself was reluctantly obliged to accept that the reactions his pictures provoked . . . were pretty much the opposite of the feelings he intended to convey." Every burst of outrage that met his shows all but sent him into nervous collapse, and Spurling emphasizes that Matisse felt very unsure of himself for most of his life. Yet he was lucky in his patrons at a time when patronage was the only route to artistic success outside the official channels. First the Steins, particularly Leo (Gertrude's sharp-eyed brother), then the Russian Sergei Shchukin, who also collected Picasso but overwhelmingly backed Matisse.

Today Matisse's work provokes the response he sought. ''I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting," he said. A theme introduced in the first volume, that ''Matisse set himself to achieve through art a stability that would counter the chaotic flux of the modern world," is central to the second volume because his marriage and family, as shaped by two iron wills, were the source of that stability.

Matisse struggled from the beginning. Spurling's first volume recounted how he became a painter over his father's objections, and only after studying law. Even after beginning his formal training with the leading academic painter of the day, he faced serious obstacles, both lack of ability as the academy defined it and a restless, anarchic temperament. As is so often the case with a naturally talented person who does not receive first-rate training early, he never overcame his faulty drawing habits and could not attain the facility the academy required. Forced out of the system, rather than returning to the provinces and taking his place in the family seed business, he became the leader of the French avant-garde.

Matisse stripped painting of the visual conventions of the Renaissance. He reverted to a vision more primitive, in fact childlike, than anything Picasso ever achieved. He was able to reduce painting to color and to merge the picture plane with the canvas, an achievement that had profound implications for later abstract painting. Many artists, down to the present, would never have painted as they did without Matisse.

In retrospect Matisse does not seem to be a modernist; his work anticipated postmodernism in its ornamental or decorative elements, brilliant flat color, a studied naivete. Matisse's naivete was a heroic rejection not just of what Spurling calls an ''exhausted classical tradition" but of the visual sophistication of previous painting. He sought to wash the eye clean. When an artist painted in a way that had been done before, he was not seeing, only copying the art of the past.

The turning point in Matisse's career came in the 1906 Independent Salon, where artists who did not fit official academy salon criteria showed. The year before, Matisse had gained notoriety for his ''Woman With a Hat," but this year he produced a thunderstroke, by far his most ambitious work to date, ''Le Bonheur de Vivre." Picasso saw Matisse as having pulled far ahead of him, and his reply would have to be even more ambitious and shocking: ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the painting that for many is the origin of modern art. These two works put Matisse and Picasso in competition for pride of place in 20th-century painting, a competition that on the evidence of Spurling's book has not yet ended. It is, in truth, hard to see how someone who greatly admires Matisse can care much for Picasso. Their works form a kind of dialogue, but it is more an argument. Matisse rejected cubism; Picasso rejected Matisse's use of color to relativize space. Was one of them right, the other wrong? In old age, Spurling writes, Matisse ''said he had been mistaken all his life in measuring the significance of any given work by the struggles that went into it."

Spurling's two volumes, in their intense focus and narrative power, compose the greatest biography yet written of a modern painter. This artist whose life was invisible before now emerges as an epic figure disguised in a business suit. For anyone who aspires to be an artist today, no book could better convey the dedication and sacrifice entailed.

David Rollow is a writer and painter who lives in Somerville.