Henri Matisse

Stephen Hahn, New York

Private Collection, London

Acquired from the above

UCLA Art Galleries, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago & The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henri Matisse, 1966, no. 172, illustrated in the catalogue

Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Matisse as a Draughtsman, 1971, no. 41

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Exposition Matisse, 1975, no. 74

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Henri Matisse, Dessin et sculpture, 1975, no. 68 illustrated in the catalogue

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Oeuvres de Henri Matisse, 1979, no. 79

London, Arts Council of Great Britain & New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, 1984-85, no. 66 illustrated in the catalogue

Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Matisse, Painter as Sculptor, 2007, no. 71 illustrated in color in the catalogue

Florent Fels, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1929, illustrated p. 38

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse, His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, illustrated p. 448

Raoul Jean Moulin, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Paper Cut-Outs, New York, 1969, illustrated pl. 11

Mario Luzi, L'Opera di Matisse dalla rivolta 'fauve' all'intimismo, Milan, 1971, illustrated p. 104

John Jacobus, Henri Matisse, New York, 1973, illustrated p. 68

Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Anne Baldassari & Claude Laugier, Matisse (exhibition catalogue), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989, illustrated p. 76

Pia Müller-Tamm, ed., Henri Matisse, Figure, Color, Space (exhibition catalogue), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005-06, illustrated p. 315

In very good condition overall. The sheet is hinged at all four corners. All edges are deckled. Full sheet is visible in the frame. Paper has slightly time-darkened with age. Three pinpoint spots of foxing in upper left corner. One pinpoint spot of foxing in upper right corner. Several small spots of very faint discoloration at extreme lower right corner.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Matisse executed this seminal work during his years in Nice. It relates directly to one of his masterpieces in oils from the period now at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Figure décorative sur fond ornemental (fig. 2). The nude female set against a decorative backdrop is a central theme for the artist, particularly in the 1920s, and this charcoal from 1925-26 embodies the strongest characteristics of the series. Matisse draws his female model with a monumentality that echoes his sculpture from the period, such as Grand nu assis, 1922-29 (fig. 1).

John Elderfield discusses this magnificent work in the context of a crucial transition in 1925: "The atmosphere suddenly changes as Matisse unexpectedly allows one of his figures its full sculptural identity - and we need this neutral pronoun to describe the drawing because Henriette has become a thing, an object. It undoubtedly reflects his renewed acquaintance with the solidity of early Renaissance art, for he visited Italy that year. The format of the drawing, however, recalls Matisse's great decorative still-lifes of around 1910, like the Fruit and Bronze, where common ornamentation on both receding and upright depicted planes tends to align itself to the plane of the picture surface, forcing the object on top of it into an ambivalent spatial and corporeal position - neither within the patterning nor separate from it, neither flat like the patterning nor completely solid" (J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 89)

Matisse's drawings of the 1920s exhibit a breathtaking formal ingenuity. The sense of volume which Matisse creates with his nude model in the present work is offset by a bold flattening of perspective in the decorative elements that fill the space around her. Matisse prefered to situate his models in richly-adorned spaces with patterned textiles, creating a dynamism in his drawings that is rarely matched in the Modernist canon. His focus, however, remains on the model. This comes through in the present work with the repeated stomping technique that the artist uses to model the supple curving forms of his subject.

Discussing his interior scenes Matisse wrote that: "My models, human figures, are never just 'extras' in an interior. They are the principal theme in my work. I depend entirely on my model, whom I observe at liberty, and then I decide on the pose which best suits her nature. When I take a new model, I intuit the pose that will best suit her from her un-self-conscious attitudes of repose, and then I become the slave of that pose. I often keep those girls several years, until my interest is exhausted. My plastic signs probably express their souls (a word I dislike), which interests me subconsciously, or what else is there? Their forms are not always perfect, but they are expressive. The emotional interest aroused in me by them does not appear particularly in the representation of their bodies, but often rather in the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper, which form its complete orchestration, its architecture. But not everyone perceives this. It is perhaps sublimated sensual pleasure, which may not yet be perceived by everyone" (quoted in Ernst Gerhard Güse, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 22).

Scholarship on this drawing suggests that although it was dated by Matisse as 1927, it's execution date is more likely 1925-26. In the catalogue from a 1975 exhibition, Dominique Fourcade suggests that the 1927 date on this work was added by Matisse when Florent Fels included the work in his 1929 publication Henri Matisse. John Elderfield concurs with this point, adding further that, "Another charcoal drawing, Buste de femme couchée, dated 1925 (Musée Matisse, Le Cateau; also reproduced in Fels, p. 15), represents the same model, Henriette, against the same background. It shows stylistic affinities with the present sheet in the treatment of the figure, and therefore supports the earlier date of this work" (The Drawings of Henri Matisse (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 266).