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Lot Essay
During the immensely creative, valedictory phase of his long career, beginning in the late 1940s, Matisse divided his time between drawing in charcoal or brush and black ink, and using scissors to create cut-outs from hand-colored papers. “Paintings seem to be finished for me now,” he wrote to his daughter Marguerite Duthuit. “I’m for decoration—there I give everything I can—I put into it all the acquisitions of my life” (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master, New York, 2005, p. 428). These culminating expressive means embodied the synthesis of color and line that Matisse had long sought in his work, now distilled to the very essentials. “It is always color that is put into play,” he explained, “even when the drawing consists of merely one continuous stroke” (quoted in A.H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, p. 128).
In brush and ink, Matisse turned for his subjects most often to the figure, with individual character vying with essence for the total effect. “The human face has always greatly interested me,” he wrote in the introduction to the folio Portraits, 1954. “[Faces] probably retain my attention through their expressive individuality and through an interest that is entirely of a plastic nature. Each face has its own rhythm and it is this rhythm that creates the likeness” (quoted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 220-221).
John Elderfield has called these late portrait drawings “haunting and highly memorable works of art—such bare, exposed things. They illuminate, as does the late work in particular, with a very steady light, spreading to fill the sheet with an even radiance. And for all their power as images, their drawing is indeed curiously unobtrusive: the fewest and swiftest of lines and the glowing sign is there” (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 134).
In brush and ink, Matisse turned for his subjects most often to the figure, with individual character vying with essence for the total effect. “The human face has always greatly interested me,” he wrote in the introduction to the folio Portraits, 1954. “[Faces] probably retain my attention through their expressive individuality and through an interest that is entirely of a plastic nature. Each face has its own rhythm and it is this rhythm that creates the likeness” (quoted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 220-221).
John Elderfield has called these late portrait drawings “haunting and highly memorable works of art—such bare, exposed things. They illuminate, as does the late work in particular, with a very steady light, spreading to fill the sheet with an even radiance. And for all their power as images, their drawing is indeed curiously unobtrusive: the fewest and swiftest of lines and the glowing sign is there” (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 134).