Jeune femme à la nature morte

Executed in 1944, this work belongs to an intense phase in Matisse's life and career. At the end of June 1943, due to the risk of Allied bombing in Nice, Matisse had moved outside the city to the villa Le Rêve, where he remained until 1949. In the spring of 1944, his ex-wife Amélie and his daughter Marguerite, who had been active in the Resistance, were arrested by the Gestapo. Matisse learned that Amélie had been sentenced to a six-month prison term but could not discover anything about his daughter Marguerite until she was freed after the liberation of Paris on 25 August. Despite the war tide’s sharp turn—the Allies landed in Normandy the month before the present work was drawn—Matisse was increasingly sick and careworn by July 1944.
Matisse’s response to the general and personal tragedies of war since 1940 had been a desperate attempt to seek refuge in his art and to radically disassociate art from war. In 1940, in the midst of his separation from his wife, while Germany was invading France, he painted Le Rêve, probably one of the most lyrical, peaceful and romantic of his later oils. From 1943, he found in the cut-out—a new form of creative expression—another way to escape the anxieties and conflicts of his life: his artistic universe became populated with poetically floating figures, organic signs on brilliantly illuminated backgrounds. Depicting an abundantly laden table covered with bowls of fruit not readily available during these calamitous times, Matisse has transported himself and his model to a more peaceful state of mind.