Aunt Michele v The New Yorker

Didn't The New Yorker used to be famous for its fact-checking?

I went back to my copy of Michele Cone's book, Artists under Vichy, and I have to say that The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl seems mighty flippant in his characterization of Michele's argument about Matisse's war-time views, and that Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling could use a new dictionary that better defines the word "allegation."

In a review of Spurling's new biography of Matisse, Schjeldahl writes: "Spurling, in her preface to 'Matisse the Master,' announces an intention to demolish 'two standard assumptions, both false.' The first, which is, indeed, common, concerns 'the supposedly exploitative relationship' that Matisse had with the women he painted. The second, which was bruited in 1992 by an American art historian, Michèle C. Cone, in a book on artists in Vichy France, is less often heard, and involves, according to Spurling, 'baseless but damaging allegations about Matisse's behavior in World War II.'"

Schjeldahl continues: "Cone bases a speculation that Matisse 'sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime' on a mild complaint by the artist, back in 1924, that people were mistaking, as French, the cosmopolitan art scene in Paris." He then goes on to point out that the artist's wife and daughter were active in the Resistance.

Here's what Michele's book actually says: "There is a possibility that Matisse (unlike his wife and his daughter, both of them active in the French Resistance) sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime." (p. 52; emphasis mine). So Michele's hedged statement, which comes at the end of several pages of discussion of Matisse's wartime activities and includes the information about the Resistance that Schjeldahl seems to offer as an argument against her position, seems somewhat less explosive than The New Yorker makes it out to be.

Schjeldahl continues: "Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement."

But in Artists under Vichy, Michele writes about this very subject of disengagement that it seems to her NOT to have reflected an overt tilt toward Vichyite nationalism: "Overall, however, it seems to me that Matisse's 'life as usual' attitude reflected a belief imbedded in the collective psyche of the French bourgeoise concening the apolitical nature of art and the political naivete of artists."

So, Michele follows up her "possibly" on nationlist sympathies as an explanation for Matisse's actions and attitudes with a "probably not." Hardly the "allegations" cited by Spurling, and far from the characterization put forward by Schjeldahl.

(Michele Cone is my aunt, and of course I am quick to rise to her defense, but it does seem to me that she's been ill-used in this debate.)