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拍品专文
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Over the summer of 1940, with the tragedy of the war unfolding and his own life-threatening medical condition necessitating major surgery, Matisse embarked on a series of free and expressive still lifes. Among the first works of the series was the present work depicting peaches, painted in July 1940. At this time, the painter was on his way to Nice, shortly after fleeing Occupied Paris.
As he would confess to Pierre Bonnard in a letter written on 7 December 1940, Matisse was deeply affected by the general atmosphere of distress, which had impacted his mood and work. His new style was in turn "less extraordinary," and "less spiritual," bringing him closer to "the matter of things" (letter from the artist to Theodore Pallady, 7 December 1940).
Many great paintings were produced or finished during this difficult time, such as Le Rêve, La blouse roumaine (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Nature morte au coquillage (The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow). All of them, including Les Pêches, fulfilled the painter's wish to "strive for starkness rather than accumulation of details; choose, for example, in the drawing, between all possible combinations, the one which will turn out to be fully expressive, as if carrying life" (the artist quoted in D. Fourcade, Ecrits et propos sur l'art, Paris, 1972, p. 321). Those paintings, as much as his life choices, proved his will to overcome the devastating effects of the war.
Matisse's pictures are intended to be expressive, to convey sense through sight. The combination of yellow, vermilion and lilac in the present painting is characteristically harmonious. The colors are blended to striking effect, revealing the master-colorist at work. At the same time, the arrangement of the peaches, depicted on a single flat plan where the only indication of perspective lent by shadows, with apparent contours in pencil, provides a delicate and essential balance between line and color.
Matisse was concerned with capturing and conveying beauty, and rejected the over-intellectualized pursuits of some other artists of his era. "I work without a theory," he explained. "I am conscious only of the forces I use, and I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture" (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, London, 2005, pp. 372-73).
Over the summer of 1940, with the tragedy of the war unfolding and his own life-threatening medical condition necessitating major surgery, Matisse embarked on a series of free and expressive still lifes. Among the first works of the series was the present work depicting peaches, painted in July 1940. At this time, the painter was on his way to Nice, shortly after fleeing Occupied Paris.
As he would confess to Pierre Bonnard in a letter written on 7 December 1940, Matisse was deeply affected by the general atmosphere of distress, which had impacted his mood and work. His new style was in turn "less extraordinary," and "less spiritual," bringing him closer to "the matter of things" (letter from the artist to Theodore Pallady, 7 December 1940).
Many great paintings were produced or finished during this difficult time, such as Le Rêve, La blouse roumaine (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Nature morte au coquillage (The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow). All of them, including Les Pêches, fulfilled the painter's wish to "strive for starkness rather than accumulation of details; choose, for example, in the drawing, between all possible combinations, the one which will turn out to be fully expressive, as if carrying life" (the artist quoted in D. Fourcade, Ecrits et propos sur l'art, Paris, 1972, p. 321). Those paintings, as much as his life choices, proved his will to overcome the devastating effects of the war.
Matisse's pictures are intended to be expressive, to convey sense through sight. The combination of yellow, vermilion and lilac in the present painting is characteristically harmonious. The colors are blended to striking effect, revealing the master-colorist at work. At the same time, the arrangement of the peaches, depicted on a single flat plan where the only indication of perspective lent by shadows, with apparent contours in pencil, provides a delicate and essential balance between line and color.
Matisse was concerned with capturing and conveying beauty, and rejected the over-intellectualized pursuits of some other artists of his era. "I work without a theory," he explained. "I am conscious only of the forces I use, and I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture" (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954, London, 2005, pp. 372-73).