Regrettably, The Swan Thieves becomes unmoored as a result of word bloat. Perhaps a different editor could have cut it down to the three-hundred-page novel it is at heart, but by the middle of the 564 pages, I grew dangerously restive. The central conundrum – why the painter seemingly went crazy – is intriguing, but Kostova stretches it out in the equivalent of a shaggy dog story, and several plot elements lack credibility. Rather than being a surprise, the ending is telegraphed eons earlier. And the other characters besides Marlowe lack special distinction.

With so much to offer, The Swan Thieves would have made a fine mystery or a lyrical literary novel; as a baggy mixture of both, it ends up as interesting but flawed. 2½ stars.

. . . Matisse reversed his brush at the end of the final sitting and scratched great white lines in the wet paint, circling the body and swirling out from it like a bud unfurling or wings clapping open. The slight, grave, pale figure within this vortex of whorls and claw marks conveys a poignant sense of human vulnerability and endurance. . . . ‘Matisse says himself it’s a bit of an enormity,’ Prichard wrote from Germany on 7 July. ‘His picture shocks even him a little, he feels uneasy and slightly surprised. He seems to me like a sparrow hawk that has hatched an eagle. He feels in himself something greater than himself, a Socratic demon, the enemy.’

Some weeks ago I’d joined Melbourne’s unexpected (at least to me) and laudable stampede to see the Dali exhibition in its last days, and yesterday it struck me that at that exhibition I had managed to achieve a fledgling form of looking ‘a little more closely,’ as Damon Young expresses it. I joined the queues snaking through the packed gallery in walking clothes, tired after a day-long outing, so I was physically sated, unwired. Emptying my mind, at least to some extent, enabled me to take what I could from Dali’s dizzyingly eclectic output. At the end, I wasn’t even able to categorise my ‘best pictures’ or even to ‘judge,’ but what I carried away from those shrouded rooms was a fond fascination for the artist, coupled to a desire to both see more (but when will that ever be?) and to learn more (about Dali, about his art). The experience, at the time hardly revolutionary, now seems to me wholly successful.

Yet something was missing and that was Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Sure, we get plenty of him – in public, in love, in desperation – but somehow the man himself eluded me. More to the point, his muse and creativity seemed to always lie outside the narrative frame. It is as if we see him but only as a privileged documentary maker would. By focusing on the four women at the centre of his life, the architect is allowed to escape. I’m forced to conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that The Women is most eloquent and absorbing but ultimately short on illumination.

that the invention of photography released painting from the need to copy nature. From now on art was free to condense and synthesise, eliminating surface detail in an attempt to penetrate rather than reproduce reality. He said that the aim of the new art was to ‘present emotion as directly as possible and by the simplest means’ . . .

I have always preferred photographs of humans to painted portraits, not so much because photos possess some greater reality but because they hold so much detail. One can stare at an exquisite facial photograph for ages.

Spurling’s book has a colour plate of Matisse’s 1908 painting The Girl with Green Eyes. I keep coming back to its flat, multicoloured peek into a woman’s soul. Perhaps, after all, paintings can penetrate the skin-and-bone complexity captured by a camera.

• The third one in the series, Red Riding: 1983, is a corker, coming with a virtuoso plot knitting together the first two. In some ways darker than the first two, with its main protagonist one of the corrupt West Yorkshire policemen, it nonetheless offers a ray of sunshine at the end. 4 stars.
• I saw Van Gogh: Brush with Genius at the monster IMAX cinema. This must be a short doco for TV, only three quarters of an hour long. The central premise, an accented artist-from-the-beyond the grave talking about his works, is twee, but I must admit that being able to see the gorgeous colour of Van Gogh’s works portrayed so large, with the camera zooming in to reveal individual brush strokes, was a wonderful experience. 3 stars.

A slowing down of sales or even a full stop doesn’t mean all is lost. . . . On the contrary, you lose your nerve and stop working, you justify your detractors, and compromise your own future. . . . All you have to do is work. If you’re in trouble, it’s through work that you will get out of it. If you know clearly where you’re going, if your ideas are solidly based, it’s through work that you will make them succeed.

All I have to do is work.

Matisse himself was reluctantly seduced that summer by a collection of exotic butterflies on display in the window of a postcard merchant opposite the Louvre on the rue de Rivoli. The butterflies, mounted behind glass on a plaster backing, included one with wings of the same blue as the sulphur flame with which he had first tried to create Mediterranean light as a schoolboy in his toy theatre in Bohain. Matisse gave a comical account of how his iron determination not to waste his money on anything so futile was undermined by this butterfly (“blue, but such a blue! It pierced my heart”) for which, in spite of his best efforts at resistance, he paid fifty francs he could ill afford, salving his conscience by including it among the presents he brought back from Paris for his wife.

What is my blue?

Matisse by the turn of the century was already beginning to baffle and disturb people meeting him for the first time. Younger students who worked alongside him . . . all recalled that impression he gave of banked, smouldering, sometimes barely contained fires. . . . At the time, it was more often demons than dancing girls that rose up to haunt Matisse: demons of rejection, isolation, financial desperation, worst of all the blind demons of custom and familiarity that fought him inch by inch in the long struggle to break through to a new way of seeing nature.

There are simply too many superlatives to describe Spurling’s effort: if you’re interested in the painter or the relationship between art and life, these books are priceless.

Having now read the first of the two, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908, I’m in full agreement. Eloquent, sympathetic without being syncophantic, and seamlessly comprehensive, this biography provides an indelible portrait of an artist driven, by complex demons I still don’t understand (and I wish I did), to progressively move beyond the boundaries of established art. Matisse was unlike many of his equally destitute painter compatriots, in that he supported a substantive family, and the book chronicles his perennial stress about money. Only at age forty – the end of this first volume – does he begin to earn enough to leasve poverty behind.

What was the outcome from reading this? A primary purpose was to ‘learn art,’ as I put it to myself. I’m a reader and listener foremost, and have also come to film – the culture of film – late, but visual art bewilders me. No doubt having poor vision is a reason – my perception of the world is far less visual, in some fundamental sense, than most people’s. But my incomprehension of fine art must, I believe, also stem from inattention. Damon Young tackles this intelligently in Distraction, and he focuses on Matisse. By coincidence, at the Hermitage last year, I saw a room full of Matisses and was very taken. Hence Spurling . . .

Does reading a biography of a famous painter assist in appreciating his art? I’ve always been ambivalent about the cult of the creator, wanting very much to let work stand on its own but also being drawn to attend signings and to read up on favourite bands. All I can say is that in this case The Unknown Matisse has helped me considerably. Appreciating how his painting evolved and why it was considered so revolutionary has helped my eye take in the art with added meaning. I’ve decided I very much like the way Matisse jettisoned classical painting aspects like perspective and fidelity to reality. ‘Unrealistic’ paintings that shocked the art world seem perfectly reasonable, indeed expressive, to me. No doubt that’s partly due to a modern sensibility but I’m beginning to realize Matisse’s emphasis on colour speaks to my eye.

I found I was able to appreciate Matisse’s earliest breakaway efforts (Spurling includes numerous colour plates) but that the 1905-1908 paintings appeal most. My favourites so far:

• The Open Window, Collioure – according to Spurling, the open door/window motif attracted Matisse and I can say it attracts me too, and I love the mix of colours
• Self-portrait (1906) – this turns the artist’s face, tinged with green, framed with purple, his eyes lucid, into an unforgettable window to his soul (you can see it affects me directly and an art philistine like me can barely believe it)
• Woman in a Hat – an incredible and scarcely credible profusion of colour that nonetheless captures his wife’s face better than photgraphy could
• Bathers with a Turtle – the emotion being conveyed with three plain strips of colour making up land, sea and sky, and distorted nude figures full of . . . I’m not sure what
• Harmony in Red (La Desserte) – complete attention on red