Those two rival giants of 20th century avant-garde art, Picasso and Matisse - whose work was so publicly antithetical - privately "drew closer than ever before" in the last decade of Matisse's life. "They swapped notes and compared problems," writes Hilary Spurling in her mammoth and compelling, revelatory Matisse the Master.

This is the second and final volume of her biography of this extraordinary French artist, covering the years 1909 to 1954. Half a century after his death, the first biography of Matisse is complete. Matisse will never seem quite the same again.

"Picasso complained," she goes on, "about the effortless, inborn sense of beauty, balance and proportion against which he had fought savagely all his life, Matisse lamented the lack of natural facility that had made his entire career a relentless uphill struggle."

And yet facility, not to mention frivolity, superficiality, decorativeness, childish incompetence, and irrelevance were too often the accusations Matisse suffered from contemporaries, particularly in the 1920s and 30's.

Other writers have certainly recognized his "uphill struggle," the exhaustive complexities that assailed him as he aimed at purity, serenity, and simplicity in his luminous art. But the very scale and detail of this biography really conveys the relentlessness of this struggle. Even in his crowning achievement, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence in southern France, his habitual practice of abandoning work when it did not measure up and of starting over again until it did, had not left him. The Dominican brother who had first stimulated the project "was astonished, even appalled by the way Matisse worked, especially by how calmly he accepted setbacks." Spurling is clear that it is a simplistic mistake to be fooled by the apparent ease or spontaneity of his paintings, drawings, and paper cut-outs into thinking them facile or shallow.

In fact, her biography repeatedly emphasizes the wide discrepancies between Matisse's reputation and the actuality as revealed in the wealth of letters and documentary evidence available to her through the cooperation of Matisse's heirs. Again and again his new work, when first seen in public, sparked outrage. This, he believed, was the result of being a truly questing artist inventing a "new language," an artist always "fifty years ahead of his time."

The "fauve" phase of his work, and then the great paintings "Dance" and "Music" painted for the remarkable Russian collector Shchukin, shocked and dismayed; yet shock was hardly his prime motivation.

Matisse was never a "half-measure" artist. There was, by his own admission, particularly at the outset of a new work, a kind of violence that called for sublimation. Yet his distress was extreme when work that was for him the height of ecstasy or extravagant joy, work that had liberated brilliant color and expressed light as never before, caused furious and humiliating dismissal.

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