NEW YORK, NY.- In May 1940, as Parisians fled the advancing German Army, Henri Matisse was returning to the French capital. Sick, elderly and stunned by the success of the blitzkrieg, the world-famous artist was compelled to safeguard forty years of artwork. From Paris he returned to his adopted home, the ancient port of Nice on the Mediterranean, where he passed the terrible years of war and occupation. To leave France, he felt, would be a betrayal.

Hitler, seeking cultural as well as territorial conquest, had decreed avant- gardism to be “an enemy of the state.” The failed watercolorist-turned- dictator exalted traditionalism over contemporary art, taught Germans to jeer at surrealist, expressionist, and Dadaist works, and to equate artists like Matisse and Picasso with cultural disintegration. Considered “degenerate art,” many Matisse artworks would be removed from galleries and museums and hidden in storage rooms—or worse, stolen by the Nazis.

Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France (on sale Sept. 30, 2025) by Christopher C. Gorham, is a vivid portrayal of the advancement of fascism and war into French life and culture during World War II through the lens of one of the country’s most celebrated post-impressionists and his family.

During the Occupation, resistance would be a family affair. Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse’s companion, would keep Henri alive through devastating illness, depression, and national crisis, protecting the artist, already a national treasure.

Henri’s son Pierre would mount a New York City exhibit of émigré artists who formed the avant-garde, setting the stage for the city to become the postwar capital of modern art. The eldest son, Jean, was in constant danger for his sabotage efforts. Matisse’s grandson, Jean’s son Pierrot, worked for a counterfeiter and fled the city to Normandy, just as the bloody Allied landing was about to commence. Daughter Marguerite, as bold and daring as her father, would ferry intelligence from Rennes to Bordeaux, both cities under German occupation. She would be arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. The family matriarch, Amélie, in her 70s, was fortified by her open contempt for the Nazis and their art thievery. She, too, would be betrayed and arrested.

Through the unrest, heartache, sickness and physical challenges, Matisse would continue to work, painting, sketching, and pushing himself to see the darkening world in lyrical pure color and with the promise of joy. These works have become a testament to optimism in the face of war and fear.

To examine the life of Matisse and his family during the Occupation of France is to explore the choices forced upon them and their fellow citizens: courage or survival, authoritarianism or democracy? Gorham writes, “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.’”

Using intimate letters between Matisse and his family and friends, and benefitting from experts, archivists, and curators at fine art institutions in Europe and the US, Gorham has spotlighted a vital chapter of Matisse’s operatic life—a time of prodigious creation against the backdrop of the four-way war among the Germans, Italians, Allies, and the French Resistance.

Matisse at War is a unique, timely, and bittersweet biography that will be studied for decades to come.

Christopher C. Gorham is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, literary events, colleges, and book club gatherings.



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