“What I did before this illness, before this operation always has the feeling of too much effort; before this, I always lived with my belt tightened. What I created afterwards represents me myself: free and detached.”
In late summer of 1942, Henri Matisse approached his easel with a novel artistic invigoration. At last surmounting the effects of a major, risk-laden surgery in January 1941, the seventy-one year-old master completed in the following months a prodigious body of canvases that brim with the unabashed ebullience of being afforded what he declared a "second life" (Letter from the artist to Albert Marquet, 16 January 1942, reprinted in Exh. Cat., Saint Louis Art Museum, Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, 1977, p. 43). Executed in October 1942, Jeune fille en robe rose is a paean to Matisse’s ceaseless creative determination and a herald of the artist's late oeuvre.
World War II found Matisse ensconced in the sanctuary of his grand home and studio at the Hôtel Régina in Cimiez, Nice, where he remained steadfastly committed to his art despite the city’s occupation by the Vichy regime and threats of displacement. “In order to prevent an avalanche overwhelming me,” Matisse wrote to his daughter, Marguerite Duthuit, as France fell to Germany in June of 1940, “I’m trying to distract myself from it as far as possible by clinging to the idea of the future work I could still do, if I don’t let myself be destroyed” (quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, New York, 2005, p. 393). Eschewing any reference to the outside world, intimate still lifes and female portraits reflected his light-suffused and theatrically-ornamented lodgings, offering a salve of beauty and hope amidst the turmoil of his homeland.
Bolstered by the artist’s miraculous recovery from his early 1941 surgery, the artist's determination was channeled into a newfound dedication to drawing, a central pillar of his oeuvre. Matisse’s year and a half-long convalescence spurred hundreds of drawings replete with an exultant spontaneity and lyrical purity of line. Struggling for decades to reconcile the stylistic disparity between his paintings and drawings, a conflict that he perceived as inhibiting his ability to achieve full painterly expression, he resolved to now manifest the liberation achieved in his drawings within his paintings. The artist proclaimed to his son Pierre in April 1942, “For the last year I have made an enormous effort in drawing. What I’ve produced has been like a floraison (flowering) after fifty years of efforts. I need to do the same in painting” (quoted in Pierre Schneider, Matisse, London, 1984, p. 648).
“It may seem that joy radiates from my work more than in the past, but this is exactly what I tried to do fifty years ago...It had taken me all this time to reach a stage where I can say what I want to say”
Jeune fille en robe rose fully deploys this gestural freedom, proclaiming the radical transformation of Matisse’s painting practice. The studio wall and the sitter are compressed to a unified, bi-dimensional plane, both distilled to their essence of color and line. Enclosed by emphatic contours, the flattened expanses of the sitter’s costume and skin form sites for a joyous interplay of pigment, with riotous ochres and pinks emboldened by intermittent glimpses of aquamarine and orange. Matisse here revels in the expressive powers of color as a discrete compositional entity, affirming Pierre’s Schneider’s declaration that, “What the 1941 operation gave birth to was color. Color would now give itself over unreservedly to its potential, just as drawing had earlier surrendered to its potential'' (Pierre Schneider, Matisse, London, 1984, p. 650). The self-assured gaze of the sitter, Monette Vincent, coupled with the vigorous physicality of Matisse’s figuration, is an emphatic declaration of the artist’s renewed painterly confidence and vitality.
While Jeune fille en robe rose is a marked departure from the ornamented interiors of Matisse’s earlier Nice portraits, the lozenge-patterned backdrop nonetheless evokes the myriad Kuba textiles of the Congo that adorned the artist’s residence (see fig. 1). Its incised white diagonals endow the pictorial surface with simultaneous structure and dynamism; the surrounding black, paradoxically, functions to produce light in the absence of an exterior light source. Expounding on this effect, Matisse stated, “Black is a color which does not need to only indicate shadowing and darkness; all depends on the relationships given it. It can play the same part as white in a luminous color harmony” (Henri Matisse, note, 22 September 1946, reprinted in Pierre Schneider, Matisse, London, 1984, p. 492) and in 1946 declared in the magazine Derrière le miroir, “Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction” (Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 106). Black, in its stark tonal contrast, enhances the vibrancy of the sitter’s chromatic hues and imparts her with an internal luminosity. Evoking the tenebrous backgrounds of his forerunner, Édouard Manet, Matisse masterfully re-engages with a compositional device wielded to radical effect in such celebrated paintings as Porte-fenêtre à Collioure and his Tangiers paintings of 1912-13 (see figs. 2 and 3).
Right: Fig. 3 Henri Matisse, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure, 1914, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Art © 2024 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jeune fille en robe rose stands among Matisse’s last accomplishments of his nearly thirty-year Nice period, before threats of bombardment in June 1943 obliged him to evacuate the city. At Villa Le Rêve in nearby Vence, the distilled figuration of the present work would be deployed in full force with his complete dedication to paper cut-outs (see fig. 4). Jeune fille en robe rose is a triumph of Matisse’s indefatigable artistic ambition.
