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Lot Essay
Georges Matisse has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
“My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion,” Matisse declared in the opening of his Notes of a Painter on His Drawing, published in 1939 (J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 130). Between 1935 and 1937, Matisse created a sequence of drawings in pen and India ink, representing female figures at ease, nude or clothed, in elaborate interior settings. These “are among the finest achievements of his draughtsmanship,” John Elderfield claimed. “Some of the individual sheets are breathtaking in their assurance and audacity, and almost without exception, they realize what the comparable, late 1920s ink drawings did not: decorative assimilation of the figure into the decorated unity of the sheet” (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 113).
The present work clearly descends from the novel creations where the figure becomes one with her interior. Here, a young woman dressed in a form-fitting patterned dress stands behind a bowl of fruit propped on a lavishly decorated side table, and next to a large armchair, an oasis of negative space within an explosion of patterns. Looking directly at the viewer with seemingly melancholic eyes, she clasps her hands below her chest, her shoulders drawing back to reveal her sensual figure. Behind her, the wallpaper echoes the figure’s dress: an intricate network of leaves forms the diamond-shaped pattern, reminiscent of the sitter’s dress, where intersections are crowned by a single flower; within each diamond are bouquets of flowers and foliage.
“These drawings are more complete than they appear,” Matisse asserted. “They generate light…they contain, in addition to the flavor and sensitivity of the line, light and value differences that quite clearly correspond to color…I distinctly feel that my emotion is expressed by means of plastic writing. Once my emotive line has modelled the light of the paper without destroying its precious whiteness, I can neither add nor take anything away. The page is written; no correction is possible. If it is not adequate, there is no alternative than to begin again, as if it were an acrobatic feat. It contains, amalgamated according to my possibilities of synthesis, the different points of view that I could more or less assimilate through my preliminary study” (quoted in ibid., pp. 113-114).
“My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion,” Matisse declared in the opening of his Notes of a Painter on His Drawing, published in 1939 (J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 130). Between 1935 and 1937, Matisse created a sequence of drawings in pen and India ink, representing female figures at ease, nude or clothed, in elaborate interior settings. These “are among the finest achievements of his draughtsmanship,” John Elderfield claimed. “Some of the individual sheets are breathtaking in their assurance and audacity, and almost without exception, they realize what the comparable, late 1920s ink drawings did not: decorative assimilation of the figure into the decorated unity of the sheet” (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 113).
The present work clearly descends from the novel creations where the figure becomes one with her interior. Here, a young woman dressed in a form-fitting patterned dress stands behind a bowl of fruit propped on a lavishly decorated side table, and next to a large armchair, an oasis of negative space within an explosion of patterns. Looking directly at the viewer with seemingly melancholic eyes, she clasps her hands below her chest, her shoulders drawing back to reveal her sensual figure. Behind her, the wallpaper echoes the figure’s dress: an intricate network of leaves forms the diamond-shaped pattern, reminiscent of the sitter’s dress, where intersections are crowned by a single flower; within each diamond are bouquets of flowers and foliage.
“These drawings are more complete than they appear,” Matisse asserted. “They generate light…they contain, in addition to the flavor and sensitivity of the line, light and value differences that quite clearly correspond to color…I distinctly feel that my emotion is expressed by means of plastic writing. Once my emotive line has modelled the light of the paper without destroying its precious whiteness, I can neither add nor take anything away. The page is written; no correction is possible. If it is not adequate, there is no alternative than to begin again, as if it were an acrobatic feat. It contains, amalgamated according to my possibilities of synthesis, the different points of view that I could more or less assimilate through my preliminary study” (quoted in ibid., pp. 113-114).