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Lot Essay
In November 1916, with the Great War in its third harrowing year and Matisse’s art coming as close to pure abstraction as it ever would, a new model entered the artist’s life, a young woman who would utterly transform his painting. Her name was Lorette, and during the next six or seven months, he painted nobody and nothing else. “No other model ever absorbed him so exclusively and at this degree of intensity either before or afterward,” Hilary Spurling has noted (quoted in R. Rabinow & D. Aagesen, eds., Matisse: In Search of True Painting, exh. cat., New York, 2012, p. 101). Although Matisse’s inaugural painting of Lorette, L’Italienne (1916, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), is among the most austere and reductive of his wartime works, the stream of portraits that followed—some fifty in all—usher in a wholly new sensuality and freedom, establishing the direction of his art for much of the next decade.
Very little is known about this raven-haired woman whose hedonistic, Mediterranean persona so liberated and revitalized Matisse’s art. A notation in his journal suggests that the painter Georgette Sembat introduced the two, a welcome favor during wartime when models were scarce. She may have been the sister of Rosa Arpino, who had posed for Matisse in 1906. Whatever her biography, she evidently made quite the impression on the entire Matisse clan. The artist’s elder son Jean is said to have been infatuated with her and dreamed of marriage; the younger Pierre recalled that during breaks from posing she liked to go to the open window for air, stark naked, apparently oblivious to gawking neighbors. Matisse, for his part, had never before had a model available to him day after day, and his exhaustive exploration of her form—which now assumed priority over abstract notions of pictorial expressiveness—took on an almost obsessive intimacy.
The speed and alacrity with which Matisse changed aesthetic course following Lorette’s fortuitous arrival in his studio suggest that, by the end of 1916, he craved release from the constraints of abstraction. “I was coming out of long and wearying years of searching,’ he later recalled, ‘during which I had given the best of myself, after many inner conflicts, in order to bring those researches to the point of achieving what I hoped would be an unprecedented creation. After having started out with some exuberance, my painting had evolved toward decantation and simplicity. A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colours and forms, in which the arabesque strove to establish its supremacy” (quoted in S. D’Alessandro & J. Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917, exh. cat., Chicago, 2010, p. 310).
Lorette possessed a gift for transformation that proved to be just the stimulus Matisse needed at this pivotal juncture. He painted her in a variety of guises—as a Spanish señorita, a Parisian coquette, a turbaned odalisque—and, still more striking, in a wide range of moods; from one canvas to the next, she shifts from hieratic gravity to flirtatious playfulness, from ethereal purity to Dionysian abandon. Sometimes she reclines or sleeps in an armchair; most often, though, she is seen full-face and at close range, enabling Matisse to devise endlessly inventive variations on her strong features, heart-shaped visage, and wavy black tresses.
In the present painting, Lorette appears lost in thought, her deep brown eyes drifting upward in quiet reverie. Softly arched brows and plump lips lend a subtle sensuality, echoed in the languid placement of her hand against her cheek. She wears a sheer white blouse, its diaphanous sleeves and open neckline revealing the graceful line of her neck and collarbone, rendered with fluid, abbreviated strokes that allow warm flesh tones to emerge beneath the translucent surface. This is the same blouse worn in his first portrait of her, L’Italienne (1917, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Here, Matisse abandons the rigidity of his earlier composition in favor of a freer handling of paint. Bold, calligraphic contours define the figure as interior passages dissolve into loose, flickering brushwork. A vibrant turquoise ground, laid in broad strokes, heightens her immediacy, while form is articulated through color, creating a composition that is both structured and liberated, suffused with a quiet sensual charge.
Lorette ceased posing for Henri Matisse in the summer of 1917, after which he briefly turned to landscape and still life. Her absence was keenly felt, prompting his move to Nice later that year in search of a new model. While Antoinette Arnoud and later Henriette Darricarrère would shape his celebrated odalisque paintings, none played so pivotal a role as Lorette. Through her, Matisse reintroduced a new sensuality and psychological immediacy into his work, marking a decisive turning point in his practice.
Very little is known about this raven-haired woman whose hedonistic, Mediterranean persona so liberated and revitalized Matisse’s art. A notation in his journal suggests that the painter Georgette Sembat introduced the two, a welcome favor during wartime when models were scarce. She may have been the sister of Rosa Arpino, who had posed for Matisse in 1906. Whatever her biography, she evidently made quite the impression on the entire Matisse clan. The artist’s elder son Jean is said to have been infatuated with her and dreamed of marriage; the younger Pierre recalled that during breaks from posing she liked to go to the open window for air, stark naked, apparently oblivious to gawking neighbors. Matisse, for his part, had never before had a model available to him day after day, and his exhaustive exploration of her form—which now assumed priority over abstract notions of pictorial expressiveness—took on an almost obsessive intimacy.
The speed and alacrity with which Matisse changed aesthetic course following Lorette’s fortuitous arrival in his studio suggest that, by the end of 1916, he craved release from the constraints of abstraction. “I was coming out of long and wearying years of searching,’ he later recalled, ‘during which I had given the best of myself, after many inner conflicts, in order to bring those researches to the point of achieving what I hoped would be an unprecedented creation. After having started out with some exuberance, my painting had evolved toward decantation and simplicity. A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colours and forms, in which the arabesque strove to establish its supremacy” (quoted in S. D’Alessandro & J. Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917, exh. cat., Chicago, 2010, p. 310).
Lorette possessed a gift for transformation that proved to be just the stimulus Matisse needed at this pivotal juncture. He painted her in a variety of guises—as a Spanish señorita, a Parisian coquette, a turbaned odalisque—and, still more striking, in a wide range of moods; from one canvas to the next, she shifts from hieratic gravity to flirtatious playfulness, from ethereal purity to Dionysian abandon. Sometimes she reclines or sleeps in an armchair; most often, though, she is seen full-face and at close range, enabling Matisse to devise endlessly inventive variations on her strong features, heart-shaped visage, and wavy black tresses.
In the present painting, Lorette appears lost in thought, her deep brown eyes drifting upward in quiet reverie. Softly arched brows and plump lips lend a subtle sensuality, echoed in the languid placement of her hand against her cheek. She wears a sheer white blouse, its diaphanous sleeves and open neckline revealing the graceful line of her neck and collarbone, rendered with fluid, abbreviated strokes that allow warm flesh tones to emerge beneath the translucent surface. This is the same blouse worn in his first portrait of her, L’Italienne (1917, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Here, Matisse abandons the rigidity of his earlier composition in favor of a freer handling of paint. Bold, calligraphic contours define the figure as interior passages dissolve into loose, flickering brushwork. A vibrant turquoise ground, laid in broad strokes, heightens her immediacy, while form is articulated through color, creating a composition that is both structured and liberated, suffused with a quiet sensual charge.
Lorette ceased posing for Henri Matisse in the summer of 1917, after which he briefly turned to landscape and still life. Her absence was keenly felt, prompting his move to Nice later that year in search of a new model. While Antoinette Arnoud and later Henriette Darricarrère would shape his celebrated odalisque paintings, none played so pivotal a role as Lorette. Through her, Matisse reintroduced a new sensuality and psychological immediacy into his work, marking a decisive turning point in his practice.