The summer of 1942 was a bleak moment in World War II. The German Army had the Russian city of Leningrad locked under siege and was eyeing Stalingrad. The Japanese had followed their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor with victories in Singapore, Malaya, and the Philippines. Paris and most of northern France were in their third summer under Nazi occupation, and the collaborationist Vichy government ruled over the south of the country.
The gloom of war hung over the ancient port of Nice, bounded by the Alps, the Mediterranean Sea, and Fascist Italy, just as it did over France’s greatest modernist painter, Henri Matisse, who made the city his adopted home. At 72, he had evaded death the previous winter with an abdominal surgery that left him unable to stand at an easel. Despite his pain and friends’ entreaties to seek safety—he was offered a teaching post in San Francisco and had a visa to Rio de Janeiro—he defiantly remained in France, intent on keeping up his rigorous art regimen, even if it meant sitting up in bed to sketch.
Against this backdrop, Matisse received an unsolicited visit from the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon. The 44-year-old and his lovely wife, Elsa Triolet, were on the run. As a leader of the French Communists, Aragon, a French Army veteran who had fought against the Germans in 1940, had been arrested and imprisoned before being mistakenly freed.
Aragon’s visit was one of the many surprises I encountered as I researched my new book, Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France. Why would a writer on the Gestapo’s hit list risk his freedom—and even his life—to meet an ailing avant-garde artist?
The “Poet of the Resistance” had several reasons, it turns out, for seeking out Matisse. Both the writer and the artist had drawn the Nazi regime’s ire for their so-called degenerate art. Both also knew this was not only a war of national liberation but a struggle against a reactionary foe willing to violently turn the clock back on social and political progress. “In spite of [the] dangers” of staying in France, Aragon wrote, “we see emigration … as desertion. This country, my country, must not be abandoned at such an hour.” Matisse expressed the same sentiment in response to his son’s effort to get him to the U.S. “If everyone of value leaves France,” he said, “what will become of France?”
Matisse and Aragon also knew of fellow artists and painters, such as Paul Claudel and André Derain, who were cozying up to the Nazis. By continuing to create the kind of art that stood against the wishes and tastes of the occupying enemy, the two seemed destined to develop a kinship. In the words of Françoise Gilot, Pablo Picasso’s wartime companion:
Culture had to be upheld like a flag against Hitler’s totalitarian empire, against his cult of superhuman Nietzschean values. [Hitler] was waging war against civilization as most understood it.... Truth had to supersede the unleashed forces of darkness.
Matisse’s resolve to live and work through wartime strife made the artist “a beacon of hope for the young,” recalled Gilot, who was in her 20s during W.W. II. Matisse, who considered “the continuation of culture a patriotic response in and of itself,” was a symbol to the French people—and to Aragon—that their distinctive heritage could not be extinguished.
Matisse and Aragon also shared a respect for women, which was at odds with the Vichy view that a woman’s place was in the home and with the Nazi fetishization of the male conqueror. In Aragon’s poem “La Diane Française,” Triolet’s golden hair is transformed into “the fire of approaching liberation.” In Matisse’s Woman Reading at a Yellow Table, the flaxen-haired model wears a blouse of spring-like green, signifying hope. Like a modern Marianne, the French symbol of liberty and wisdom, Matisse’s woman doesn’t hold the book so much as cradle it. On her reading table sits a vase of red flowers, against a blue wall, illuminated by a patch of white—the French tri-color.
Day after day, Aragon took the tram up the hill to the once grand building where Matisse lived. The artist was as economical with his words as the poet was free with his. While Aragon set his observations of Matisse down on paper, the artist silently fixed his “blue hunter’s gaze” on his interviewer. The only sound was Matisse’s pencil as he sketched his friend. “He, whose portrait I thought I was drawing, had started to draw mine,” Aragon said.
Before Aragon slipped out of Nice to stay one step ahead of the authorities, he wrote the preface to a book of drawings Matisse was to publish in 1943. The impact Matisse made on the Resistance poet was to last a lifetime. In 1972, Aragon published a massive, two-volume work on Matisse. Its nearly 800 pages are lyrical, meditative, and factual. But no sentence is as powerful as the one Aragon wrote in his preface in the middle of the World War:
“The time had come to be aware of the national reality of Matisse … because he was of France, because he was France.”
Christopher C. Gorham is a Boston-based lawyer, educator, and author of The Confidante
