Henri Matisse

Hubert Goldet, France
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1995)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down and hinged to the mount at the upper two corners. The right and lower edges are deckled and there are some small nicks to the extreme left edge. There is a small area of discolouration to the centre of the lower edge and some minor creases in places. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the ink is more black than brown in the original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

By the early 1930s, the popular and critical success Matisse enjoyed through the first half of his career placed the artist in a position to accept a number of professional opportunities to advance his aesthetic practice while subtly and playfully diverging from his solidifying painterly legacy. Effectively canonized by a series of high-profile exhibitions held in 1931 at the Galerie Georges Petit, the Basel Kunsthalle, and the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, Matisse was approached by the publisher Albert Skira to illustrate a volume of poetry by the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé. Matisse's book preparations, paired with drafts for a mural commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, established drawing as a practice central and now iconic to Matisse's later life.  The refocusing of Matisse's practice in the midst of his career's success reinvigorated the artist's ruminations on sketching, cartooning and painting as instrumental to the enlivening of his essential artistic spirit. Interestingly, Matisse's writings often differentiate between painters, whose objectives are to replicate their surroundings, and artists, who, across all forms and media, convey the conceptual and spiritual dimensions of a uniquely expressive vision of the material world.  Matisse, of course, rightly figured himself a true artist: undeniably and irreconcilably complicit with a perspective on the world previously unknown to Modern art.

Matisse's fluid shifts between painting and drawing and the consistent quality of his work speaks to the pervasive integrity of the artist's vision. In the present work, Matisse deftly integrates the sensual lines of his pen and ink nudes with the spatial and ornamental configurations of his painted interiors. As the artist wrote: 'Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share' (Henri Matisse, 'Notes d'un Peintre', in La Grande Revue, Paris, December 25, 1908). The apparent spontaneity of Matisse's drawings belies a grander sense of totality derived from careful and attentive posturing and an overarching concern with an internal compositional logic. As Ernst Gerhard Güse wrote, "'here is nothing provisional about [Matisse's] drawings: they are complete, finished works, resulting from an extended process of identification. Through the connection between the line and the artist's emotions, his inner life, the drawing becomes an act of assimilation, taking possession of nature' (E.G. Güse, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 22).