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Lot Essay
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Buste de jeune femme presents the vision of a beautiful young woman, endowed with the fine nose, large eyes and voluptuous mouth, enhanced by the confident, exuberant, line of the artist’s distinctive hand. It is a deftly worked surface in which the artist investigates the interplay of positive and negative space with mastery, pre-empting his revolutionary cut-outs, the body of work that would come to consume his later life endeavours.
The sitter’s head is cast in shadow by a broad swathe of smudged charcoal. This serves to soften and enrich the darker black of the line that delineates her face, adding a mysterious quality to her gaze, as though her face is in relief; veiled and masked from view. The model’s manner of dress—the elaborate millinery suggested by the lively lines atop her head, her layered necklace and delicately-ribboned gown—speak to Matisse’s renowned interest in colour, texture and pattern; his interest in fabrics and couture often being attributed to his family history with the textiles industry.
Elements of costume also suggest a context of social parade, a hidden narrative. The present work bears close resemblance to the painting Femme au chapeau bleu of the same year (sold, Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1995, lot 134), a wider view of the same scene and model within a patterned interior executed based on the same sitting.
Yet it is the modest inscription at the upper left corner of Buste de jeune femme, which brings forward a further dimension to this piece. It cites a reference to L’Amour du mensonge, Baudelaire’s poem from Les Fleurs du mal, first published in 1857. Included in Tableaux Parisiens, this poem was published in the second edition of the tome in 1861 wherein censored poems were removed with new poems added. Widely interpreted as a criticism of modern Paris, this new chapter draws on a number of characters – the Seven Old Men, the Hard-working Skeleton, the Mendicant Redhead, the gambler, the prostitute, the blind man – to expound the suffering and emotional isolation of the downwardly-mobile attempting to survive amongst the affluent and indifferent within the atmosphere of Raoul Hausmann’s new vision of his beloved city.
The original edition of Baudelaire’s infamous work was finally cleared for publication in France in 1949, five years after the current portrait was executed. Matisse’s illustrated edition of Fleurs du mal was published in 1947, two years prior, and thus represented the second edition. His approach to this task was to illustrate the book of poems solely with portraits of many different sitters which included Baudelaire and the artist himself as well as a number of other predominantly female subjects. This made for an engaging and unusually non-illustrative counterpart to the text. As expressed by Kathryn Brown ‘Matisse’s imagery for Les fleurs du mal prompts a visual experience of beauty on the part of the viewer that is often at odds with, but dependent on a complimentary expression of beauty in the accompanying poems.’ (Kathryn Brown, The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-century Europe, Farnham, 2013, p. 31.)
Although this is not the drawing used to accompany Baudelaire’s poem in Matisse’s illustrated edition, the principle of the combination of image and text remains the same. Seeing the probable source of this composition, the model in the larger painting, within a decidedly Matissean interior, we can see that the sitting itself was separate from simply a literal interpretation of the literary work. Instead, the small inscription at the lower right suggests a connection, a contemplation of this portrait with the context of the written poem, verbally depicting a young, emotionally removed woman. The text from L’Amour de mensonge nonetheless appears more in line with the text in its mood. Its ending is almost perfectly appropriate in the context of Matisse’s artistic vision, the final line reading: ‘Hail, mask or curtain, I adore your beauty!’.
Love of Lies (L’Amour du mensonge)
Dear indolent, I love to watch you so,
While on the ceiling break the tunes of dances,
And hesitant, harmoniously slow,
You turn the wandering boredom of your glances.
I watch the gas-flares colouring your drawn,
Pale forehead, which a morbid charm enhances,
Where evening lamps illuminate a dawn
In eyes as of a painting that entrances:
And then I say, "She's fair and strangely fresh,
Whom memory crowns with lofty towers above.
Her heart is like a peach's murdered flesh,
Or like her own, most ripe for learned love."
Are you an autumn fruit of sovereign flavour?
A funeral urn awaiting tearful showers?
Of far oases the faint, wafted savour?
A dreamy pillow? or a sheaf of flowers?
I have known deep, sad eyes that yet concealed
No secrets: caskets void of any gem:
Medallions where no sacred charm lay sealed,
Deep as the Skies, but vacuous like them!
It is enough that your appearance flatters,
Rejoicing one who flies from truth or duty.
Your listless, cold stupidity — what matters?
Hail, mask or curtain, I adore your beauty!
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1861. (Translation: Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire, New York, 1952.)
Buste de jeune femme presents the vision of a beautiful young woman, endowed with the fine nose, large eyes and voluptuous mouth, enhanced by the confident, exuberant, line of the artist’s distinctive hand. It is a deftly worked surface in which the artist investigates the interplay of positive and negative space with mastery, pre-empting his revolutionary cut-outs, the body of work that would come to consume his later life endeavours.
The sitter’s head is cast in shadow by a broad swathe of smudged charcoal. This serves to soften and enrich the darker black of the line that delineates her face, adding a mysterious quality to her gaze, as though her face is in relief; veiled and masked from view. The model’s manner of dress—the elaborate millinery suggested by the lively lines atop her head, her layered necklace and delicately-ribboned gown—speak to Matisse’s renowned interest in colour, texture and pattern; his interest in fabrics and couture often being attributed to his family history with the textiles industry.
Elements of costume also suggest a context of social parade, a hidden narrative. The present work bears close resemblance to the painting Femme au chapeau bleu of the same year (sold, Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1995, lot 134), a wider view of the same scene and model within a patterned interior executed based on the same sitting.
Yet it is the modest inscription at the upper left corner of Buste de jeune femme, which brings forward a further dimension to this piece. It cites a reference to L’Amour du mensonge, Baudelaire’s poem from Les Fleurs du mal, first published in 1857. Included in Tableaux Parisiens, this poem was published in the second edition of the tome in 1861 wherein censored poems were removed with new poems added. Widely interpreted as a criticism of modern Paris, this new chapter draws on a number of characters – the Seven Old Men, the Hard-working Skeleton, the Mendicant Redhead, the gambler, the prostitute, the blind man – to expound the suffering and emotional isolation of the downwardly-mobile attempting to survive amongst the affluent and indifferent within the atmosphere of Raoul Hausmann’s new vision of his beloved city.
The original edition of Baudelaire’s infamous work was finally cleared for publication in France in 1949, five years after the current portrait was executed. Matisse’s illustrated edition of Fleurs du mal was published in 1947, two years prior, and thus represented the second edition. His approach to this task was to illustrate the book of poems solely with portraits of many different sitters which included Baudelaire and the artist himself as well as a number of other predominantly female subjects. This made for an engaging and unusually non-illustrative counterpart to the text. As expressed by Kathryn Brown ‘Matisse’s imagery for Les fleurs du mal prompts a visual experience of beauty on the part of the viewer that is often at odds with, but dependent on a complimentary expression of beauty in the accompanying poems.’ (Kathryn Brown, The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-century Europe, Farnham, 2013, p. 31.)
Although this is not the drawing used to accompany Baudelaire’s poem in Matisse’s illustrated edition, the principle of the combination of image and text remains the same. Seeing the probable source of this composition, the model in the larger painting, within a decidedly Matissean interior, we can see that the sitting itself was separate from simply a literal interpretation of the literary work. Instead, the small inscription at the lower right suggests a connection, a contemplation of this portrait with the context of the written poem, verbally depicting a young, emotionally removed woman. The text from L’Amour de mensonge nonetheless appears more in line with the text in its mood. Its ending is almost perfectly appropriate in the context of Matisse’s artistic vision, the final line reading: ‘Hail, mask or curtain, I adore your beauty!’.
Love of Lies (L’Amour du mensonge)
Dear indolent, I love to watch you so,
While on the ceiling break the tunes of dances,
And hesitant, harmoniously slow,
You turn the wandering boredom of your glances.
I watch the gas-flares colouring your drawn,
Pale forehead, which a morbid charm enhances,
Where evening lamps illuminate a dawn
In eyes as of a painting that entrances:
And then I say, "She's fair and strangely fresh,
Whom memory crowns with lofty towers above.
Her heart is like a peach's murdered flesh,
Or like her own, most ripe for learned love."
Are you an autumn fruit of sovereign flavour?
A funeral urn awaiting tearful showers?
Of far oases the faint, wafted savour?
A dreamy pillow? or a sheaf of flowers?
I have known deep, sad eyes that yet concealed
No secrets: caskets void of any gem:
Medallions where no sacred charm lay sealed,
Deep as the Skies, but vacuous like them!
It is enough that your appearance flatters,
Rejoicing one who flies from truth or duty.
Your listless, cold stupidity — what matters?
Hail, mask or curtain, I adore your beauty!
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1861. (Translation: Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire, New York, 1952.)