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Lot Essay
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
In 1918, nearing the age of fifty and with his reputation as a leader of the avant-garde firmly established, Matisse intentionally turned away from his earlier work and set about to find a new artistic direction. "My idea is to push further and deeper into true painting," he explained to his wife Amélie (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, New York, 2007, p. 223). The site of this transformation would be a series of hotel rooms and apartments that Matisse took over the course of the next decade at the seaside resort of Nice, where he first traveled in December 1917. Intending only a brief stay, he remained for more than five months, captivated by the distinctive light of the Côte d'Azur-- "a light so soft and tender, despite its brilliance," he wrote to Charles Camoin (quoted in J. Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 170).
After returning home to Issy for the summer and fall, he made a second sojourn to Nice from November 1918 until June 1919, initiating a pattern of annual peregrinations that would persist until 1930. This time, he settled at the Hôtel Méditerranée et de la Côte d'Azur, a modest Victorian guesthouse at 25, promenade des Anglais. His room had double French doors and a balcony with a carved balustrade, which offered a panoramic view over the Baie des Anges and provided Matisse with a fertile environment for his artistic experiments. Hilary Spurling has written, "The exuberant New Year's greetings he sent his wife at the start of 1919 already included a sketch of the basic elements--the dressing table, the balustrade, and the swagged muslin curtains framing the bedroom window--with which he would construct and reconstruct painted spaces that broke all known rules of pictorial correctness" (op. cit., p. 220).
Painted during this second sojourn in Nice, Femme auprès de la fenêtre depicts a young woman in a simple white peignoir--most likely, Antoinette Arnoux, who posed frequently for Matisse in 1919-1920--gazing out the French doors of the artist's hotel room. The painting's principal protagonist, however, is not the model, who is pushed to the very periphery of the composition, but rather the window itself; the model's main function is to embody the act of looking that underpins the window's significance. The window had been a key theme in Matisse's work since his revolutionary Fauve summer of 1905, when he painted the dazzling light of a new day streaming in through an open window at Collioure and setting his room ablaze with color. At the Hôtel Méditerannée, the tall French doors feature prominently in painting after painting, letting in the brilliant sunshine that Matisse found so compelling in the South of France; by moving the doors' many parts (curtains, windowpanes, and shutters), the artist could shape the light and space of the painted interior.
In Femme auprès de la fenêtre, he goes even further, introducing a veritable equivalence between window and canvas that plays on the Renaissance notion of a painting as a view through a window. The French doors (or rather, a portion of them) are now shown parallel to the picture plane and the exact same width as the canvas itself. The doors' vertical crosspiece divides the composition neatly in two, like the bar of a stretcher or an artist's perspective grid, as well as establishing the window as a two-dimensional object in its own right, like the canvas. At the same time, the glass panes provide a spatial link between near and far, interior and exterior, which is mediated by the sheer café curtains whose floral pattern brings a bit of nature into the studio. The balcony that would afford physical access to the world beyond is closed off, however, with only a narrow strip of the balustrade announcing its presence; the view through the window remains a wholly aesthetic one, an object of the painter's (and the model's) contemplation. Shirley Blum has concluded, "For Matisse the window was a constant, as important in its expression as the room itself. Together they enabled the pictorial revolution taking place on his canvases" (Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, New York, 2010, p. 16).
In 1918, nearing the age of fifty and with his reputation as a leader of the avant-garde firmly established, Matisse intentionally turned away from his earlier work and set about to find a new artistic direction. "My idea is to push further and deeper into true painting," he explained to his wife Amélie (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, New York, 2007, p. 223). The site of this transformation would be a series of hotel rooms and apartments that Matisse took over the course of the next decade at the seaside resort of Nice, where he first traveled in December 1917. Intending only a brief stay, he remained for more than five months, captivated by the distinctive light of the Côte d'Azur-- "a light so soft and tender, despite its brilliance," he wrote to Charles Camoin (quoted in J. Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 170).
After returning home to Issy for the summer and fall, he made a second sojourn to Nice from November 1918 until June 1919, initiating a pattern of annual peregrinations that would persist until 1930. This time, he settled at the Hôtel Méditerranée et de la Côte d'Azur, a modest Victorian guesthouse at 25, promenade des Anglais. His room had double French doors and a balcony with a carved balustrade, which offered a panoramic view over the Baie des Anges and provided Matisse with a fertile environment for his artistic experiments. Hilary Spurling has written, "The exuberant New Year's greetings he sent his wife at the start of 1919 already included a sketch of the basic elements--the dressing table, the balustrade, and the swagged muslin curtains framing the bedroom window--with which he would construct and reconstruct painted spaces that broke all known rules of pictorial correctness" (op. cit., p. 220).
Painted during this second sojourn in Nice, Femme auprès de la fenêtre depicts a young woman in a simple white peignoir--most likely, Antoinette Arnoux, who posed frequently for Matisse in 1919-1920--gazing out the French doors of the artist's hotel room. The painting's principal protagonist, however, is not the model, who is pushed to the very periphery of the composition, but rather the window itself; the model's main function is to embody the act of looking that underpins the window's significance. The window had been a key theme in Matisse's work since his revolutionary Fauve summer of 1905, when he painted the dazzling light of a new day streaming in through an open window at Collioure and setting his room ablaze with color. At the Hôtel Méditerannée, the tall French doors feature prominently in painting after painting, letting in the brilliant sunshine that Matisse found so compelling in the South of France; by moving the doors' many parts (curtains, windowpanes, and shutters), the artist could shape the light and space of the painted interior.
In Femme auprès de la fenêtre, he goes even further, introducing a veritable equivalence between window and canvas that plays on the Renaissance notion of a painting as a view through a window. The French doors (or rather, a portion of them) are now shown parallel to the picture plane and the exact same width as the canvas itself. The doors' vertical crosspiece divides the composition neatly in two, like the bar of a stretcher or an artist's perspective grid, as well as establishing the window as a two-dimensional object in its own right, like the canvas. At the same time, the glass panes provide a spatial link between near and far, interior and exterior, which is mediated by the sheer café curtains whose floral pattern brings a bit of nature into the studio. The balcony that would afford physical access to the world beyond is closed off, however, with only a narrow strip of the balustrade announcing its presence; the view through the window remains a wholly aesthetic one, an object of the painter's (and the model's) contemplation. Shirley Blum has concluded, "For Matisse the window was a constant, as important in its expression as the room itself. Together they enabled the pictorial revolution taking place on his canvases" (Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, New York, 2010, p. 16).