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Lot Essay
Wanda de Guébriant will examine this bronze in Paris immediately following the sale in order to confirm that this cast can be included in the forthcoming revised edition of the Matisse sculptures catalogue raisonné as an additional cast numbered seven in the edition, supplemental to the cast listed in the 1997 publication.
In 1929, just over a decade after the start of his Nice period, Matisse arrived at a crossroads in his career. Although he could still draw, etch, and sculpt, he found himself entirely unable to paint. His major canvas of that year, La robe jaune (Baltimore Museum of Art), remained unfinished until 1931, despite his repeated struggles to resolve the composition. Seeking a fresh light and new inspiration, he embarked in February 1930 on a five-month journey to Tahiti (fig. 1). "The retina tires of the same old methods," he explained to Tériade shortly before he set sail. "It demands surprises" (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, New York, 2007, pp. 301-302).
In Tahiti, Matisse sketched profusely, filling page after page with linear drawings of the island's lush tropical vegetation. Although the trip would not become a major source of iconography for Matisse until the mid-1940s, when his memories of the island's pleasures surfaced in his late, great paper cut-outs, it nevertheless ushered in a radically new formulation in his art. Matisse's alternatives upon his return to Nice, Yves-Alain Bois has explained, were "to return placidly to his population of odalisques, or to renew a highly experimental streak in his art, interrupted in 1918" (op. cit., p. 57). The sixty-year-old artist boldly chose the latter course, turning away from the descriptive detail and illusionistic space of his Nice period and developing a more abstract and decorative late style. Pierre Schneider has written, "The voyage to the other side of the world appears, in retrospect, a major turning point, a hinge between the two major phases of his oeuvre" (op. cit., p. 605).
Matisse began work on the present sculpture almost immediately after he returned to Nice in August 1930. It was complete by the end of the year, in time to be cast in bronze for an important exhibition of the artist's sculpture that opened in January 1931 at the Brummer Gallery in New York. The sculpture was inspired by the tiari or Tahitian gardenia, a large tropical flower that women on the island often used to adorn their hair. In a clever visual analogy unusual in Matisse's work, La Tiaré fuses the image of its namesake blossom with that of the woman herself to create a femme-fleur. The simplified oval of the head is also the center of the flower, while the pistil-like nose is surrounded by a conglomeration of bulbous shapes that may be read either as an elaborate hairstyle (even, in a verbal pun, as a head surmounted by a tiara) or as clusters of petals and leaves. A smooth wedge of a stem is fitted into the back of the neck, suggesting two stalks--human and botanical--that merge to produce the same flower. The sculpture thus combines two aspects of Matisse's memory of Tahiti, as he would later describe it to Louis Aragon: "a Tahitian girl, with her satin skin, with her flowing, curling hair, the copper glow of her coloring combining sumptuously with the somber greenery... The almost suffocating scent of tuberoses and of that Tahitian flower the tiari tells the traveler he is nearing that isle of thoughtless indolence and pleasure, which brings oblivion and drives out all care for the future" (quoted in J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 137).
In modeling La Tiaré, Matisse looked back to several of his own earlier sculptures: the bulbous clumps of hair and the protuberant, spoon-shaped nose appear in Jeannette III and V respectively (Duthuit, nos. 52 and 55), while the intimate scale and overall format of the sculpture recall the 1907 Tête au collier (Duthuit, no. 34). La Tiaré differs from these sources, however, in supplanting their vigorous modeling with a smooth, refined surface and unified, organic forms. Although this tendency toward simplification and stylization is characteristic of Matisse's sculpture from this period (cf. Henriette II, the two small torsos of 1929, and the fourth and final Dos), it reaches its apex in La Tiaré, which Jed Morse has described as "a pinnacle of formal purity" (exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 192). The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz wrote about La Tiaré, "The surfaces are almost neutral, the volumes poeticized to a sublime degree" (quoted in M. Mezzatesta, op. cit., p. 129). The sculpture has been likened to works by Arp and Brancusi, and indeed, the phallic quality of the pistil-nose calls to mind the sleek, tumescent stylizations and erotic double entendre of Brancusi's infamous Princesse X. More relevant than any external influence, however, is Matisse's own internal quest. The harmonious, sensual elegance of La Tiaré evokes all the "indolence and pleasure" of the artist's experience in the South Seas, while the abstract purity of form and surface are a harbinger of his late painting style, inaugurated the following year in the Barnes Danse. John Elderfield has concluded, "Worthy of note is the fact that Matisse opted [in La Tiaré] for the poetic, the decorative, and the calm at the very time his painting was beginning to regain its decorative characteristics after the Nice period" (op. cit., p. 138).
La Tiaré was cast by Valsuani in a numbered edition of ten plus one artist's proof. The first four bronzes date to 1930, while the remaining examples (including the present one) were cast between 1950 and 1957. Bois has proposed that Picasso may have seen the sculpture at the foundry in 1930, and that it may have provided a source for the great series of sculpted heads that he began at Boisgeloup the following year, with their radical re-ordering of anatomy through an agglomeration of organic shapes (op. cit., p. 247, note 154). To the cast numbered '1/10' (Baltimore Museum of Art, formerly in the celebrated collection of Etta Cone), Matisse added an actual necklace of gold and silver links, underscoring the play between floral and human and between abstraction and reality.
In addition to the exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, La Tiaré was also featured in a major Matisse retrospective that Alfred Barr mounted at The Museum of Modern Art in November 1931; the museum would later acquire the second cast (2/10) of the sculpture. Around 1935, Matisse's son Jean, himself a sculptor, carved a white marble replica of the composition (Musée Matisse, Nice), extending the reference to the white Tahitian gardenia in a highly evocative way. La Tiaré was the only sculpture that Matisse ever allowed to be translated into stone-- "evidence of his recognition of its special purity," Elderfield has proclaimed (op. cit., p. 138).
(fig. 1) Matisse in Tahiti, March 1930.
Barcode: 28972662_fig
In 1929, just over a decade after the start of his Nice period, Matisse arrived at a crossroads in his career. Although he could still draw, etch, and sculpt, he found himself entirely unable to paint. His major canvas of that year, La robe jaune (Baltimore Museum of Art), remained unfinished until 1931, despite his repeated struggles to resolve the composition. Seeking a fresh light and new inspiration, he embarked in February 1930 on a five-month journey to Tahiti (fig. 1). "The retina tires of the same old methods," he explained to Tériade shortly before he set sail. "It demands surprises" (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, New York, 2007, pp. 301-302).
In Tahiti, Matisse sketched profusely, filling page after page with linear drawings of the island's lush tropical vegetation. Although the trip would not become a major source of iconography for Matisse until the mid-1940s, when his memories of the island's pleasures surfaced in his late, great paper cut-outs, it nevertheless ushered in a radically new formulation in his art. Matisse's alternatives upon his return to Nice, Yves-Alain Bois has explained, were "to return placidly to his population of odalisques, or to renew a highly experimental streak in his art, interrupted in 1918" (op. cit., p. 57). The sixty-year-old artist boldly chose the latter course, turning away from the descriptive detail and illusionistic space of his Nice period and developing a more abstract and decorative late style. Pierre Schneider has written, "The voyage to the other side of the world appears, in retrospect, a major turning point, a hinge between the two major phases of his oeuvre" (op. cit., p. 605).
Matisse began work on the present sculpture almost immediately after he returned to Nice in August 1930. It was complete by the end of the year, in time to be cast in bronze for an important exhibition of the artist's sculpture that opened in January 1931 at the Brummer Gallery in New York. The sculpture was inspired by the tiari or Tahitian gardenia, a large tropical flower that women on the island often used to adorn their hair. In a clever visual analogy unusual in Matisse's work, La Tiaré fuses the image of its namesake blossom with that of the woman herself to create a femme-fleur. The simplified oval of the head is also the center of the flower, while the pistil-like nose is surrounded by a conglomeration of bulbous shapes that may be read either as an elaborate hairstyle (even, in a verbal pun, as a head surmounted by a tiara) or as clusters of petals and leaves. A smooth wedge of a stem is fitted into the back of the neck, suggesting two stalks--human and botanical--that merge to produce the same flower. The sculpture thus combines two aspects of Matisse's memory of Tahiti, as he would later describe it to Louis Aragon: "a Tahitian girl, with her satin skin, with her flowing, curling hair, the copper glow of her coloring combining sumptuously with the somber greenery... The almost suffocating scent of tuberoses and of that Tahitian flower the tiari tells the traveler he is nearing that isle of thoughtless indolence and pleasure, which brings oblivion and drives out all care for the future" (quoted in J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 137).
In modeling La Tiaré, Matisse looked back to several of his own earlier sculptures: the bulbous clumps of hair and the protuberant, spoon-shaped nose appear in Jeannette III and V respectively (Duthuit, nos. 52 and 55), while the intimate scale and overall format of the sculpture recall the 1907 Tête au collier (Duthuit, no. 34). La Tiaré differs from these sources, however, in supplanting their vigorous modeling with a smooth, refined surface and unified, organic forms. Although this tendency toward simplification and stylization is characteristic of Matisse's sculpture from this period (cf. Henriette II, the two small torsos of 1929, and the fourth and final Dos), it reaches its apex in La Tiaré, which Jed Morse has described as "a pinnacle of formal purity" (exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 192). The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz wrote about La Tiaré, "The surfaces are almost neutral, the volumes poeticized to a sublime degree" (quoted in M. Mezzatesta, op. cit., p. 129). The sculpture has been likened to works by Arp and Brancusi, and indeed, the phallic quality of the pistil-nose calls to mind the sleek, tumescent stylizations and erotic double entendre of Brancusi's infamous Princesse X. More relevant than any external influence, however, is Matisse's own internal quest. The harmonious, sensual elegance of La Tiaré evokes all the "indolence and pleasure" of the artist's experience in the South Seas, while the abstract purity of form and surface are a harbinger of his late painting style, inaugurated the following year in the Barnes Danse. John Elderfield has concluded, "Worthy of note is the fact that Matisse opted [in La Tiaré] for the poetic, the decorative, and the calm at the very time his painting was beginning to regain its decorative characteristics after the Nice period" (op. cit., p. 138).
La Tiaré was cast by Valsuani in a numbered edition of ten plus one artist's proof. The first four bronzes date to 1930, while the remaining examples (including the present one) were cast between 1950 and 1957. Bois has proposed that Picasso may have seen the sculpture at the foundry in 1930, and that it may have provided a source for the great series of sculpted heads that he began at Boisgeloup the following year, with their radical re-ordering of anatomy through an agglomeration of organic shapes (op. cit., p. 247, note 154). To the cast numbered '1/10' (Baltimore Museum of Art, formerly in the celebrated collection of Etta Cone), Matisse added an actual necklace of gold and silver links, underscoring the play between floral and human and between abstraction and reality.
In addition to the exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, La Tiaré was also featured in a major Matisse retrospective that Alfred Barr mounted at The Museum of Modern Art in November 1931; the museum would later acquire the second cast (2/10) of the sculpture. Around 1935, Matisse's son Jean, himself a sculptor, carved a white marble replica of the composition (Musée Matisse, Nice), extending the reference to the white Tahitian gardenia in a highly evocative way. La Tiaré was the only sculpture that Matisse ever allowed to be translated into stone-- "evidence of his recognition of its special purity," Elderfield has proclaimed (op. cit., p. 138).
(fig. 1) Matisse in Tahiti, March 1930.
Barcode: 28972662_fig