Charles Miller, The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse, Vence’s Chapel of the Rosary, Unicorn Publishing Group 2024 232 pp £27
This is a beautiful book, both physically and in its content. Unicorn has provided the spacious format and excellent photographic reproduction essential for the telling of a story in which drawing, colour and spatial awareness express “the spiritual adventure” of the great French modernist Henri Matisse. No-one before has told this story in such evidenced detail and with such interpretative intelligence, the story of how the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence came into being and how its creator was completed in its making.
Charles Miller has presented an impressively readable and lucid narrative. The book’s ten chapters trace a complex story of events and relationships that amount to an account of the growth of the artist’s mind and spirit. It fills in a gap left unexplored by Matisse’s principal English biographer, Hilary Spurling, who gives little attention to the chapel, notwithstanding Matisse’s recorded declaration that he believed it was his greatest artistic achievement.
Matisse’s “spiritual adventure” begins around 1940, when in advanced age and ill-health he undergoes a near-death operation and is nursed at a clinic in Lyons, staffed by Dominican sisters, for whom he first offers to design a chapel. Then, having relocated to Vence later in the war, he meets again his former night nurse and model, Monique Burgeois, now in Vence as Souer Jacques-Marie, who is working in the Dominican convent there. His second offer to design, build and fund a chapel at Vence was his expression of gratitude for the loving care he had received from the Dominican nuns who had nursed him. “I feel as if I had come back from the dead,” he wrote to his son Pierre in 1941.
As a consequence of his friendship with the superior of the convent at Vence, Matisse was introduced to the lively intellectual and aesthetic culture of a group of French Dominican friars and their network. Matisse’s creative spirit was revived in recognising the common ground between his own aesthetic principles and the new vibrant ideas the Dominicans of Le Saulchoir were enunciating as a development in Catholic tradition. We meet them all, among them those same Dominicans who twenty years later would contribute so much intellectually and spiritually to the work of the Second Vatican Council. They, with their journals exploring a new place for art and aesthetics in Catholic theology and liturgy, became Matisse’s friends and guides, and led him back to an expressive Christian faith that had remained unnourished since by the rigid French Catholicism of his boyhood.
From 1947 to 1951, during which years the chapel was built and completed, Matisse committed himself to painstaking work on every aspect of the Chapel of the Rosary, not only its famous stained glass and murals, but also its liturgical vestments, altar decorations, furniture and lighting. Bed-ridden and dogged by pain, yet sustained by this extraordinary group of friends and supporters, Matisse was inspired to create a work of sublime beauty and simplicity. He died a few months after its consecration by the Bishop of Nice.
In telling this story after meticulous research in letters and essays, published and unpublished, Charles Miller has rescued Henri Matisse from the desiccations of the French doctrine of laicite. Miller is a scholar and story teller with a broad palette of awareness, historical, theological, aesthetic, liturgical and spiritual. He has written elsewhere about his encounter with Russian Orthodox art and liturgy, an encounter shared with Matisse himself. His notes, index and bibliography are exemplary. As Rector of the Anglican parish of Abingdon-on-Thames he has been for nearly twenty years a teacher and spiritual guide himself and in writing this book he has made this remarkable story a spiritual adventure for us all.
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