Henri Matisse

Pierre Matisse
Susanna Allen Fine Art, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at all four corners, and floating in the overmount. The upper, left and right edges are deckled. This work is in overall very good condition.
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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."

The present work is a remarkable example of Henri Matisse’s much lauded skill as a draughtsman. Matisse's line drawings enabled him to channel his creative vision with more spontaneity than in his painting.  Drawing allowed for an immediate and intuitive execution of a compositional idea, without having to negotiate the placement of colour.  The artist increasingly turned towards draftsmanship, believing that the act of painting could not offer a comparable sense of creative release. Matisse himself wrote ‘My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion. The simplification of the medium allows that… Once my emotive line has modeled the light of my white paper without destroying its precious whiteness, I can neither add nor take anything away. The page is written’ (quoted in Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 21).

The confident yet relaxed pose of Matisse's model in the present work is typical of the artist's muses, their gazes directed unfalteringly towards the viewer reflecting an air of self-assurance. Attired elegantly, the whole effect of Femme perse is one of profound confidence, both in terms of the sitter's own pose and in the artist's mastery of his medium and subject. Executed in 1933, just after the artist had completed his illustrations for Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, the present work represents the height of Matisse’s work in fine line pencil drawings.