The biographer as detective

Fresh from winning the overall Whitbread award, Hilary Spurling explains to the Guardian why she kept on a 15-year odyssey to chronicle the life and times of painter Henri Matisse, even if it felt like falling down a rabbit hole at times:

“My publisher was probably the only person in the world to realise that nobody had written a biography of Matisse and he suggested that I do it,” she says. “I felt my heart leap – I assumed it had been done, and was thrilled it hadn’t. I was all wrong for it: I wasn’t an art historian, I wasn’t French and I am a woman. I thought these things would be a problem, but they helped.

“That’s when I appealed to Matisse experts in Paris, London and New York and the message came back: he was a painter, but there is no biography. People deduced a life from the serene paintings. Because I’m a biographer, I said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ I loved his paintings and I couldn’t believe pictures of such power were painted by such a dull man.”

As for Spurling’s next project, all she’ll say is that she hopes it “won’t take 15 years” to work on…

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