Unfolding Matisse: Henri Matisse's "working library" of textiles, packed away in trunks and closets since the artist's death in 1954, is now the focus of a revelatory exhibition of artworks and fabrics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss put it in his study of totemism, are good for thinking with. Likewise, Henri Matisse might have affirmed that textiles are good for painting with. Good for exhibiting paintings with as well, as attested by a fine and admirably concise exhibition with a rather cumbersome title, "Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams." Museum curators are always looking for new angles on the blockbuster-worthy masters--the Monets, the Picassos, and so on--but rarely do they succeed in helping us see the work afresh. More often these shows are opportunities to revisit old favorites and add some mental footnotes to what one already knows. Here is something different: an exhibition that really succeeds in shedding new light on a familiar artist.

Perhaps the reason for this fresh view is that the exhibition's guiding spirit is not an art historian but the artist's biographer, Hilary Spurling. An English writer whose earlier books were not mainly concerned with art but rather with, most notably, a couple of somewhat marginal British literary figures--novelists Ivy Compton-Burnett and Paul Scott--Spurling might seem an unlikely candidate for biographer of the Frenchman who is surely one of the central figures of modern art. But the first volume of her life of Matisse, published in 1998--the second is just appearing now--showed that, despite some limitations as a critic-interpreter, she was more than capable of using her assiduous research skills to uncover important and previously neglected facts that impinge on the drama of creation. Most significantly, she discovered that what Alfred Barr once dubbed Matisse's "dark years" following the turn of the century (just preceding the sudden release of energy that was Fauvism) were not simply a period of artistic latency in which the influences of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism he'd imbibed in the late 1890s gave way to a murky palette dominated by browns--perhaps, it has sometimes been thought, because he had temporarily lost his nerve. They were, in fact, a personally dark time in which his wife's family was being crushed under the burden of their connection, though innocent, with the perpetrators of one of the great scandals of the day, known as the Humbert case, a financial swindle of monumental proportions.

Massive as the impact of the Humbert scandal on Matisse's life and perhaps his art in the early years of the 20th century may have been, it would be hard to argue that it had much lasting effect. The argument behind "Matisse, His Art and His Textiles," which I saw at the Royal Academy in London, is different, and reaches closer to the core of his artistic impulse; it makes the case that the deep roots of his art lay in the single source of visual inspiration (other than nature) available to the future artist as he was growing up, primarily in the town of Bohain-en-Vermandois in Picardy, a region where the textile industry dominated everyday life. As Spurling writes, "There were no galleries, museums or art collections on display, virtually no public statuary, not even a mural in any of these smoky towns. To a child already dreaming of escape the only available outlet for a nascent visual imagination came from the sumptuous, shining, multicolored silks produced in weavers' cottages and workshops all over Bohain." (1) Some marvelous books of silk samples from Bohain, displayed in the show--which was curated by the Royal Academy's Ann Dumas, while Spurling is credited with having proposed the idea for the exhibition--suggest why these weavings might have set the boy's imagination aflame: brilliantly clear, rhythmic, vibrant and various, they seem every bit as fresh today as they must have a century ago, and as capable of nourishing dreams. Shown alongside some 80 of Matisse's works, the nearly 40 cloths, carpets, curtains, costumes and the like selected from his "working library"--in storage with the artist's family until now--give a vivid sense of how textiles were, in every sense, the material out of which he made his art.

Biographical studies are hardly at the forefront of today's art history, but perhaps they should be revived; arguably, Spurling's is the kind of insight that comes only from an immersion in the artist's life as a whole. Thus it is not surprising that the catalogue contributions other than hers, valuable as they may be, expand on topics more familiar from the existing Matisse literature. Jack Flare (who has himself written biographically about Matisse, in Matisse and Picasso, 2003) explores the development of what he calls "decorative structure" in the artist's work; Remi Labrusse considers the influence of Islamic art; and Dominique Szymusiak discusses one of the few groups of garments created by Matisse, the chasubles he designed for the Vence chapel. But none of them really takes up the artistic implications of the essentially existential importance of textiles to Matisse that Spurling propounds: "Matisse's ancestors had been weavers for generations. Textiles were in his blood. He could not live without them." (2) In this sense, the exhibition merely begins to broach a topic that will remain open to exploration for a long time to come.