“What did Matisse do during the war years, 1939-1945? Did he simply paint his way through the war, ignoring the German occupiers and the Vichy government’s compliance with their aims—including the expulsion and deportation of Jews—or did he seize a patch of the cultural battlefield, and if so, how exactly? Was he among the artists who were censored? Did he work around the restrictions? How did his efforts affect his fellow citizens? Did Matisse, as Cone asserts, take advantage of the Parisian art world from which other artists, so-called enemies of the Nazi regime, had been forced out?

And what of his family, friends, and fellow artists? We know his estranged wife, Amélie, and his daughter, Marguerite, participated in the Resistance. Matisse’s letters to his son Pierre and friends Charles Camoin and Pierre Bonnard reveal his worry about their wartime activities and whereabouts, as well as those of his son Jean, who was engaged in sabotage against the enemy. Through his letters to family and friends, and using English, French, and Italian sources from the war years onward, this is a narration of Matisse’s life and art in the context of the four-way war waged along the French Mediterranean coast among the Germans, Italians, Allies, and Resistance. To examine the life of Henri Matisse and his family during the Occupation of France is to also explore the choices forced upon them and their fellow citizens: courage or survival, authoritarianism or democracy? In telling this story, I also aim to reveal the humanity of the man who could seem conventional in his habits but whose art broke so free of convention it ‘flickers halfway between the imagined and the seen.’”