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Lot Essay
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
For Matisse, the act of drawing became virtually an obsession. Prior to 1935, drawings held a subsidiary role in Matisse's work, serving as a means of solving compositional problems that the artist encountered in his works on canvas. From 1935 onward the process of drawing had become central to his art, and served as the catalyst for changes in the evolution of his painterly aesthetic.
The elegant model in Femme à la jambe repliée was drawn with the sensitivity of a colorist. Matisse aimed for "luminous space;" tonal and value accents allow for the play of light and shadow across the sheet. In the artist's own words, "In spite of the absence of shadows or half-tones expressed by hatching, I do not renounce the play of values or modulation. I modulate with variations in the weight of line, and above all with the areas it delimits on the white paper. I modify the different parts of the white paper without touching them, but by their relationships" (quoted in The Sculpture and Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984-1985, p. 117).
By 1938, the year the present work was executed, Matisse had reached the very summit of his skills as an innovative and expressive draughtsman. He liked to paint in the mornings, and then draw in the afternoons, which might provide ideas for the next day's work. The charcoal drawings constituted an essential part of this process. John Elderfield has noted, "Painting and drawing were separated activities, and line and color functioned separately. This led Matisse to shift his attention, around 1937, to charcoal drawing, where line coalesced from areas of tonal shading. This, it seems, could help bring back line and areas of color more closely together" (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1984, p. 118).
While the charcoal drawings were often done in preparation for paintings during this time, Elderfield has pointed out that "they are realized in their own terms, and without exception show Matisse's stunning mastery of this especially sensual medium. The tonal gradations are extraordinarily subtle, yet appear to have been realized very spontaneously, and the keen sense of interchange between linear figure and ground adds tautness and intensity to their compositions. At their best, they are emotionally as well as technically rich and show us a more mortal Matisse then his line drawings do" (ibid., pp. 118-119).
In his 1939 text Notes of a Painter on his Drawing Matisse explained that "charcoal or stump drawing allows me to consider simultaneously the character of the model, her human expression, the quality of surrounding light, the atmosphere and all that can only be expressed by drawing" (J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 130-132).
For Matisse, the act of drawing became virtually an obsession. Prior to 1935, drawings held a subsidiary role in Matisse's work, serving as a means of solving compositional problems that the artist encountered in his works on canvas. From 1935 onward the process of drawing had become central to his art, and served as the catalyst for changes in the evolution of his painterly aesthetic.
The elegant model in Femme à la jambe repliée was drawn with the sensitivity of a colorist. Matisse aimed for "luminous space;" tonal and value accents allow for the play of light and shadow across the sheet. In the artist's own words, "In spite of the absence of shadows or half-tones expressed by hatching, I do not renounce the play of values or modulation. I modulate with variations in the weight of line, and above all with the areas it delimits on the white paper. I modify the different parts of the white paper without touching them, but by their relationships" (quoted in The Sculpture and Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984-1985, p. 117).
By 1938, the year the present work was executed, Matisse had reached the very summit of his skills as an innovative and expressive draughtsman. He liked to paint in the mornings, and then draw in the afternoons, which might provide ideas for the next day's work. The charcoal drawings constituted an essential part of this process. John Elderfield has noted, "Painting and drawing were separated activities, and line and color functioned separately. This led Matisse to shift his attention, around 1937, to charcoal drawing, where line coalesced from areas of tonal shading. This, it seems, could help bring back line and areas of color more closely together" (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1984, p. 118).
While the charcoal drawings were often done in preparation for paintings during this time, Elderfield has pointed out that "they are realized in their own terms, and without exception show Matisse's stunning mastery of this especially sensual medium. The tonal gradations are extraordinarily subtle, yet appear to have been realized very spontaneously, and the keen sense of interchange between linear figure and ground adds tautness and intensity to their compositions. At their best, they are emotionally as well as technically rich and show us a more mortal Matisse then his line drawings do" (ibid., pp. 118-119).
In his 1939 text Notes of a Painter on his Drawing Matisse explained that "charcoal or stump drawing allows me to consider simultaneously the character of the model, her human expression, the quality of surrounding light, the atmosphere and all that can only be expressed by drawing" (J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 130-132).