Femme debout avec les bras croisés

The present work is from a series of large brush and ink drawings in which subject matter and expressive power are closely related to Matisse’s contemporaneous paintings of figures, still lifes and interiors at Vence. These late drawings represented a synthesis of painting and drawing, pared down to the barest essentials. John Elderfield has called these drawings "truly a kind of painting by reduced means" (Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, p. 128). The drawings are conceived through the juxtaposition of black and white: the white of the sheet acquires its luminous quality through the value of black and the whole composition becomes coloristically expressive. Matisse wrote in the catalogue to a 1949 exhibition of recent works at the Musée national d'art moderne, Paris of "the special quality of brush drawing, which, though a restricted medium, has all the qualities of a painting or a painted mural. It is always color that is put into play, even when the drawing consists of merely one continuous stroke. Black brush drawings contain, in small, the same elements of colored paintings that is to say, differentiations in the quality of the surfaces unified by light" (quoted in ibid., p. 128).
While the paintings of the late 1940s tend to possess a domestic stillness and grandeur appropriate to the assured manner of a master in his old age, the brush drawings project a surprisingly bold and youthful dynamism. The present work captures in the most reduced and essential way the energy and dynamism of the sitter, Lydia Delectorskaya, the artist’s close confidante and model at the end of his life. Matisse himself once described his pen and ink drawings of the mid-1930s as "an acrobatic feat" (quoted in J. Flam, ed., "Notes of a Painter on his Drawing," Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 131). In this regard, the great late brush drawings are perhaps even more daring and scintillating.