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Lot Essay
A luminous meditation on the dichotomy between design and color, Robe noire et robe violette represents a highpoint in Henri Matisse’s decades-long exploration of the female model in interior settings. A magisterially composed canvas, worked over the course of April and May 1938, the painting unites the imagery and compositional elements which would go on to characterize Matisse’s later career, witnessed particularly in his famed cutouts. Here, Matisse achieves a flatter, more static space where brilliant color and masterful disegno are suspended in measured counterpoint, while his models are more elemental and essentialized than ever before, achieving what the art historian Jack Flam describes as Matisse’s “Eternal Feminine, in which the power of Woman is associated with creativity, fecundity, and even a state of grace” (quoted in “The Eternal Feminine” in D. Aagesen and R. Rabinow, eds., Matisse: In Search of True Painting, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012, p. 135).
The 1930s proved to be a defining decade for Matisse, a period of focus, renewal, and reflection as well as one of radical invention. While the artist achieved considerable international success at the beginning of the decade, being fêted with his first four major retrospectives—at the Thannhauser Gallery, Berlin, from February to March 1930; the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, from June to July 1931; the Kunsthalle Basel from August to September 1931; and finally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November to December 1931—the artist faced a creative crisis as he turned sixty. His exuberant, decorative works from his early Nice period the decade prior—such as his dual-model Le paravent mauresque (1921; Philadelphia Museum of Art)—were no longer drawing his interest: “in front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatever,” Matisse noted in November of 1929 (quoted in E. de Chassey, “A Crisis and Four Exhibitions” in Matisse in the 1930s, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2022, p. 31). The artist withdrew from easel painting for a five-year hiatus, undertaking a regenerative voyage around the world at the turn of the decade, visiting his son Pierre in New York before travelling to Tahiti for a pivotal five-month sojourn. On the idyllic isle, Matisse described, “I could appreciate the light, light as pure matter, and the coral earth. It was both superb and boring” (quoted in E. Tériade, “Matisse Speaks” in J. Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 254).
Matisse, rejuvenated and inspired by his profound experience of light in Tahiti, brought a startlingly new style to bear on his important commission for Albert Barnes’ mural, La Danse, which the artist completed in 1932 upon his return to Nice. This critical project simultaneously validated Matisse’s oeuvre to an international audience and provided him with a fresh point of departure away from the hedonistic fantasies of the 1920s. The flattened forms, heightened color palette, and increased dynamism latent in La Danse would evolve over the course of the decade, culminating in the sophisticated refinement of Robe noire et robe violette.
The mural also occasioned the first instance where the artist utilized photography to systematically document the cumulative process of his painting, allowing him to explore different configurations of his pictorial elements in a meticulous, procedural approach. With the aid of his photographic records, Matisse’s artistic interest shifted from the final image to his interior painting process. Describing his new approach in 1939, the artist writes, “to sum up, I work without a theory. I am conscious only of the forces I use, and am driven on by an idea which I really only grasp as it grows with the picture” (quoted in P. Müller-Tamm, “Henri Matisse: Figure, Color, Space” in Henri Matisse: Figure, Color, Space, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005, p. 39).
Robe noire et robe violette exemplifies Matisse’s newfound deliberative process, where the effortless bravura of the end result belies the meticulous effort and time which Matisse expended to resolve the canvas. The painting was begun on 16 April 1938 and not completed until 11 May. Matisse’s photographer Matossian documented four intermediate states of the painting—each stage represents a possible solution—and yet the artist continued to labor, refining the painting's forms and rhythms in a method he compared to a game of chess: “the appearance of the board is continually changing in the course of play, but the intentions of the players who moves the pawns remain constant” (“On Modernism and Tradition, 1935” in J. Flam, Matisse on Art, New York, 1978, p. 72).
In between each state, Matisse would scrape sections of oil paint off the canvas to subtly modulate his forms and color. The intermediate states capture the artist continually flattening his forms and abstracting the botanical background, which begins as a fully vegetal expanse similar to his previous painting, Deux personnages féminins et le chien (Robe bleue et robe résille) (1938; Private collection), which contains a large philodendron plant whose leaves expand across the span of the canvas. What begins as a similar plant—a hallmark of his 1930s studio interiors and inspired by the vegetation he observed in Tahiti—is slowly abstracted in the present work over the course of weeks, losing the connecting stems and distinctive leaf shape until what is left is nine heart-shaped green forms floating across a decorative violet wallpaper. Each intervention in the work formally clarified the composition and was for Matisse a way to explore “the truer, more essential” character of things, to “give reality a more lasting interpretation” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 38). As the artist wrote the following year, “as Chardin used to say, ‘I add (or I takeaway, because I scrape out a lot) until it looks right’” (“Notes of a Painter on His Drawing, 1939” in J. Flam, op. cit., 1978, p. 82).
In the same essay, Matisse describes the immense import of his models to his oeuvre. “My models, human figures, are never just ‘extras’ in an interior,” Matisse writes. “They are the principal theme in my work” (ibid., p. 81). The present work is one in a series of paintings and drawings with two female figures which Matisse created in the 1930s, which also includes La Conversation (1938; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and La Musique (1939; Buffalo AKG Art Museum). The two figures here, painted as abstracted forms whose Mannerist proportions resist the naturalism of Matisse’s earlier interiors, articulate the artist’s drive from representing the individual towards a timeless essentialized symbol. Their flattened, elongated forms parallel one another as both recline upon a blue armchair. The two models remain surprisingly consistent throughout the progression of the painting, with the artist only slightly modifying their hair and tweaking the position of their heads. The elegant violet dress worn by the leftward model is understated in comparison to the polychromatic revelry of her companion’s color-blocked skirt and textured blue blouse.
Anticipating his later figures, Matisse’s models here remain faceless, though they likely represent Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse’s principal model and studio assistant at the time, and Hélène Mercier-Galitzine, both of whom modelled for the related SFMoMA painting La Conversation, painted just after the present work. Discussing Matisse’s gradual deindividualization of his figures, Jack Flam notes how his models become “removed from the realm of the everyday and transformed into part of a decorative ensemble,” allowing Matisse to integrate their forms into the remainder of the tableau (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2012, p. 141).
At this seminal period in Matisse’s stylistic evolution, the artist increasingly emphasized bold chromatic harmonies and decorative patterning, diffusing his earlier focus on the figure across the entire surface of the canvas. The tabletop plant, with its sinuous, frantic leaves expanding out across space, animates the composition, providing a shot of linear energy. The green leaves of the plant extend out into the abstracted space of the wall and across the left model’s lap, bridging foreground, ground, and background into one unified space. The plants and decorative motifs express the models’ inner vitality in a sort of symbiosis, simultaneously drawing energy from and radiating out into their surroundings. “These powerful, timeless symbols of Woman,” Flam concludes, “well reflect the artist’s stated goal of making images that transcended the literal subject of the painting and allowed him to create a space that he described as being beyond him, ‘beyond any motif… a cosmic space’” (ibid., p. 141).
Matisse’s increasing devotion to line at the time, a prelude to his later works, is evoked in the present work’s compositional precision. He would spend the mornings with his easel paintings before devoting his attention toward drawing every afternoon, according to Delectorskaya. While temporally separating his graphic and painterly practice, in this period, Matisse blended the barriers between the two, as the scholar Ellen McBreen notes: “The interdependence of the two media—the intensity of drawing sessions allowing for the ‘apparent ease’ of painting—is also signified by the graphite marks” (“Woman in Blue” in exh. cat., op. cit., 2022, p. 189). Matisse’s linear clarity is witnessed across the present work, deftly suggesting his forms before he added in his color. Equally important to the work is his use of a pointed instrument, likely the end of his paintbrush, to excise lines of wet paint from his canvas to create parallel white lines accenting his graphic drawing. This technique, employed by the artist for decades, is especially remarkable in Robe noire et robe violette, and recalls his intensive involvement in etching and printmaking earlier in the decade, whereby with a similar process he created etchings of exceptional linear fluidity for his 1932 Poésies series, illustrating texts by Stéphane Mallarmé.
The present work thus magisterially bridges the diverse techniques and styles which Matisse practiced and refined over the course of the decade to create a fluid, essentialized style which would define the remainder of his career.
Robe noire et robe violette was acquired just months after its completion by Paul Rosenberg, who exhibited the work in his gallery in Paris later in 1938, then again at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh the following year. After its acquisition by the Illinois-based couple, Edward and Katharine Bennett, Jr., the work was frequently on loan to The Art Institute of Chicago before being acquired in 1995 by Galerie Beyeler, who lent the work to several international exhibitions in Japan and Switzerland before Si Newhouse acquired the work in 2004.
The 1930s proved to be a defining decade for Matisse, a period of focus, renewal, and reflection as well as one of radical invention. While the artist achieved considerable international success at the beginning of the decade, being fêted with his first four major retrospectives—at the Thannhauser Gallery, Berlin, from February to March 1930; the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, from June to July 1931; the Kunsthalle Basel from August to September 1931; and finally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November to December 1931—the artist faced a creative crisis as he turned sixty. His exuberant, decorative works from his early Nice period the decade prior—such as his dual-model Le paravent mauresque (1921; Philadelphia Museum of Art)—were no longer drawing his interest: “in front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatever,” Matisse noted in November of 1929 (quoted in E. de Chassey, “A Crisis and Four Exhibitions” in Matisse in the 1930s, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2022, p. 31). The artist withdrew from easel painting for a five-year hiatus, undertaking a regenerative voyage around the world at the turn of the decade, visiting his son Pierre in New York before travelling to Tahiti for a pivotal five-month sojourn. On the idyllic isle, Matisse described, “I could appreciate the light, light as pure matter, and the coral earth. It was both superb and boring” (quoted in E. Tériade, “Matisse Speaks” in J. Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 254).
Matisse, rejuvenated and inspired by his profound experience of light in Tahiti, brought a startlingly new style to bear on his important commission for Albert Barnes’ mural, La Danse, which the artist completed in 1932 upon his return to Nice. This critical project simultaneously validated Matisse’s oeuvre to an international audience and provided him with a fresh point of departure away from the hedonistic fantasies of the 1920s. The flattened forms, heightened color palette, and increased dynamism latent in La Danse would evolve over the course of the decade, culminating in the sophisticated refinement of Robe noire et robe violette.
The mural also occasioned the first instance where the artist utilized photography to systematically document the cumulative process of his painting, allowing him to explore different configurations of his pictorial elements in a meticulous, procedural approach. With the aid of his photographic records, Matisse’s artistic interest shifted from the final image to his interior painting process. Describing his new approach in 1939, the artist writes, “to sum up, I work without a theory. I am conscious only of the forces I use, and am driven on by an idea which I really only grasp as it grows with the picture” (quoted in P. Müller-Tamm, “Henri Matisse: Figure, Color, Space” in Henri Matisse: Figure, Color, Space, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005, p. 39).
Robe noire et robe violette exemplifies Matisse’s newfound deliberative process, where the effortless bravura of the end result belies the meticulous effort and time which Matisse expended to resolve the canvas. The painting was begun on 16 April 1938 and not completed until 11 May. Matisse’s photographer Matossian documented four intermediate states of the painting—each stage represents a possible solution—and yet the artist continued to labor, refining the painting's forms and rhythms in a method he compared to a game of chess: “the appearance of the board is continually changing in the course of play, but the intentions of the players who moves the pawns remain constant” (“On Modernism and Tradition, 1935” in J. Flam, Matisse on Art, New York, 1978, p. 72).
In between each state, Matisse would scrape sections of oil paint off the canvas to subtly modulate his forms and color. The intermediate states capture the artist continually flattening his forms and abstracting the botanical background, which begins as a fully vegetal expanse similar to his previous painting, Deux personnages féminins et le chien (Robe bleue et robe résille) (1938; Private collection), which contains a large philodendron plant whose leaves expand across the span of the canvas. What begins as a similar plant—a hallmark of his 1930s studio interiors and inspired by the vegetation he observed in Tahiti—is slowly abstracted in the present work over the course of weeks, losing the connecting stems and distinctive leaf shape until what is left is nine heart-shaped green forms floating across a decorative violet wallpaper. Each intervention in the work formally clarified the composition and was for Matisse a way to explore “the truer, more essential” character of things, to “give reality a more lasting interpretation” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 38). As the artist wrote the following year, “as Chardin used to say, ‘I add (or I takeaway, because I scrape out a lot) until it looks right’” (“Notes of a Painter on His Drawing, 1939” in J. Flam, op. cit., 1978, p. 82).
In the same essay, Matisse describes the immense import of his models to his oeuvre. “My models, human figures, are never just ‘extras’ in an interior,” Matisse writes. “They are the principal theme in my work” (ibid., p. 81). The present work is one in a series of paintings and drawings with two female figures which Matisse created in the 1930s, which also includes La Conversation (1938; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and La Musique (1939; Buffalo AKG Art Museum). The two figures here, painted as abstracted forms whose Mannerist proportions resist the naturalism of Matisse’s earlier interiors, articulate the artist’s drive from representing the individual towards a timeless essentialized symbol. Their flattened, elongated forms parallel one another as both recline upon a blue armchair. The two models remain surprisingly consistent throughout the progression of the painting, with the artist only slightly modifying their hair and tweaking the position of their heads. The elegant violet dress worn by the leftward model is understated in comparison to the polychromatic revelry of her companion’s color-blocked skirt and textured blue blouse.
Anticipating his later figures, Matisse’s models here remain faceless, though they likely represent Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse’s principal model and studio assistant at the time, and Hélène Mercier-Galitzine, both of whom modelled for the related SFMoMA painting La Conversation, painted just after the present work. Discussing Matisse’s gradual deindividualization of his figures, Jack Flam notes how his models become “removed from the realm of the everyday and transformed into part of a decorative ensemble,” allowing Matisse to integrate their forms into the remainder of the tableau (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2012, p. 141).
At this seminal period in Matisse’s stylistic evolution, the artist increasingly emphasized bold chromatic harmonies and decorative patterning, diffusing his earlier focus on the figure across the entire surface of the canvas. The tabletop plant, with its sinuous, frantic leaves expanding out across space, animates the composition, providing a shot of linear energy. The green leaves of the plant extend out into the abstracted space of the wall and across the left model’s lap, bridging foreground, ground, and background into one unified space. The plants and decorative motifs express the models’ inner vitality in a sort of symbiosis, simultaneously drawing energy from and radiating out into their surroundings. “These powerful, timeless symbols of Woman,” Flam concludes, “well reflect the artist’s stated goal of making images that transcended the literal subject of the painting and allowed him to create a space that he described as being beyond him, ‘beyond any motif… a cosmic space’” (ibid., p. 141).
Matisse’s increasing devotion to line at the time, a prelude to his later works, is evoked in the present work’s compositional precision. He would spend the mornings with his easel paintings before devoting his attention toward drawing every afternoon, according to Delectorskaya. While temporally separating his graphic and painterly practice, in this period, Matisse blended the barriers between the two, as the scholar Ellen McBreen notes: “The interdependence of the two media—the intensity of drawing sessions allowing for the ‘apparent ease’ of painting—is also signified by the graphite marks” (“Woman in Blue” in exh. cat., op. cit., 2022, p. 189). Matisse’s linear clarity is witnessed across the present work, deftly suggesting his forms before he added in his color. Equally important to the work is his use of a pointed instrument, likely the end of his paintbrush, to excise lines of wet paint from his canvas to create parallel white lines accenting his graphic drawing. This technique, employed by the artist for decades, is especially remarkable in Robe noire et robe violette, and recalls his intensive involvement in etching and printmaking earlier in the decade, whereby with a similar process he created etchings of exceptional linear fluidity for his 1932 Poésies series, illustrating texts by Stéphane Mallarmé.
The present work thus magisterially bridges the diverse techniques and styles which Matisse practiced and refined over the course of the decade to create a fluid, essentialized style which would define the remainder of his career.
Robe noire et robe violette was acquired just months after its completion by Paul Rosenberg, who exhibited the work in his gallery in Paris later in 1938, then again at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh the following year. After its acquisition by the Illinois-based couple, Edward and Katharine Bennett, Jr., the work was frequently on loan to The Art Institute of Chicago before being acquired in 1995 by Galerie Beyeler, who lent the work to several international exhibitions in Japan and Switzerland before Si Newhouse acquired the work in 2004.
