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Lot Essay
Due to the increasingly threatening atmosphere of wartime Nice, Matisse vacated the Hôtel Régina in March 1943 for Vence, where he settled at the imposing villa Le Rêve. Here he continued to work on his drawing and book illustrations, and painted relatively few oils. Matisse's paintings from this period boldly attest to the power of simplicity. In Jeune Femme au canapé, the vibrancy of the colors and the seeming immediacy of the painting's execution assign a sense of vitality to every component in the composition.
Matisse had fallen seriously ill in 1941, spending the first half of that year hospitalized in Lyon. His return to painting after the illness prompted a dramatic simplification in his draughtmanship. Matisse looked back to his decorative works from the early years at Nice, but rather than developing the decorative surfaces of his new pictures, he concentrated on the immaterial quality of the space, making images as flat as possible. Over the following months he executed a series of vibrant works depicting models in an interior seated in an armchair. In doing so, he continued to work with a subject that had fully occupied him since the end of the First World War. These interiors became for Matisse the territory within which he could explore fully his creed of expressive, sensual color. In the present work, Matisse constructed the subject with very limited means, and areas of color are rapidly brushed with little re-working. As the art historian Jean Selz has discussed:
The aesthetic character of Matisse's conception of color can readily be analyzed. It is a great deal more difficult to understand his view of the form of objects. His choice of color harmony seems often to have been based on the whims of his imagination, a desire to translate freely the delight of what he saw in a language whose strength lay in its very simplicity. Apart from an element of naïveté in his art, the techniques he employed in the application of color have something in common with a typical child's picture. In recognizing that 'drawing is spiritual', he further believed that it was the most intellectual and probably the most difficult element in his art to master for one who 'wanted to be able to use color as the vehicle for the expression of spritual ideas'... Matisse was never a spontaneous painter. He never felt the urge to improvise nor to be satisfied with a picture painted on the spur of the moment. He felt compelled to develop a subject by degrees, to paint by stages, producing successive versions all moving towards a more complete understanding of the whole... He also developed a more intensive application of color. His genius sprang from a 'long patience' and his bold style grew from leisurely study, the outcome of thoughtful development. 'The impression of sponteneity comes when a painter's powers pass from the conscious to the unconscious state' (J. Selz, Matisse, New York, 1964, pp. 61-64).
(fig. 1) Matisse reading in his armchair at villa Le Rêve, circa 1945.
Matisse had fallen seriously ill in 1941, spending the first half of that year hospitalized in Lyon. His return to painting after the illness prompted a dramatic simplification in his draughtmanship. Matisse looked back to his decorative works from the early years at Nice, but rather than developing the decorative surfaces of his new pictures, he concentrated on the immaterial quality of the space, making images as flat as possible. Over the following months he executed a series of vibrant works depicting models in an interior seated in an armchair. In doing so, he continued to work with a subject that had fully occupied him since the end of the First World War. These interiors became for Matisse the territory within which he could explore fully his creed of expressive, sensual color. In the present work, Matisse constructed the subject with very limited means, and areas of color are rapidly brushed with little re-working. As the art historian Jean Selz has discussed:
The aesthetic character of Matisse's conception of color can readily be analyzed. It is a great deal more difficult to understand his view of the form of objects. His choice of color harmony seems often to have been based on the whims of his imagination, a desire to translate freely the delight of what he saw in a language whose strength lay in its very simplicity. Apart from an element of naïveté in his art, the techniques he employed in the application of color have something in common with a typical child's picture. In recognizing that 'drawing is spiritual', he further believed that it was the most intellectual and probably the most difficult element in his art to master for one who 'wanted to be able to use color as the vehicle for the expression of spritual ideas'... Matisse was never a spontaneous painter. He never felt the urge to improvise nor to be satisfied with a picture painted on the spur of the moment. He felt compelled to develop a subject by degrees, to paint by stages, producing successive versions all moving towards a more complete understanding of the whole... He also developed a more intensive application of color. His genius sprang from a 'long patience' and his bold style grew from leisurely study, the outcome of thoughtful development. 'The impression of sponteneity comes when a painter's powers pass from the conscious to the unconscious state' (J. Selz, Matisse, New York, 1964, pp. 61-64).
(fig. 1) Matisse reading in his armchair at villa Le Rêve, circa 1945.