Femme assise (Lucienne Bernard)

During the immensely creative, valedictory phase of his long career, beginning in the late 1940s, Matisse divided his time between drawing in charcoal or brush and black ink, and using scissors to create cut-outs from hand-colored papers. With a heightened interest in portraiture, the artist noted: "my models are the principal theme in my work. I depend entirely on my model...My plastic signs probably express their souls, which interests me subconsciously, or what else is there? Their forms are not always perfect, but they are always 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" (quoted in J. Flam, Henri Matisse, A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 328).
In the present work, Lucienne Bernard, widow of the poet and Resistance fighter Roger Bernard, sits facing the viewer, her gaze averted and looking away, perhaps lost in thought. The subtle twist of her body—her shoulders turned right but her face turned left, adds dynamism to a seated pose, further heightened by the clean charcoal lines and bold estompe, as if the sitter was in perpetual movement, her arms shifting, her head turning.
John Elderfield has called these late portrait drawings “haunting and highly memorable works of art—such bare, exposed things. They illuminate, as does the late work in particular, with a very steady light, spreading to fill the sheet with an even radiance. And for all their power as images, their drawing is indeed curiously unobtrusive: the fewest and swiftest of lines and the glowing sign is there” (The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1984, p. 134).