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Lot Essay
Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, a leading authority on Matisse's sculpture, has noted that "more than half of Matisse's sculpted oeuvre (sixty-nine works) were executed between 1900 and 1909, at the beginning of his career as a painter. During these years of apprenticeship and development, there is a constant dialogue between his painting and his sculpture" (in op. cit., p. 9).
Matisse first used the reclining pose similar to that seen in Nu couché à la chemise in his painting Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris), an idyllic scene executed in a modified divisionist technique derived from Paul Signac and Henri Edmond Cross, in whose company Matisse had worked that summer in Saint-Tropez (see note to lot 317). The late Prof. Albert E. Elsen suggested that in modeling Nu couché à la chemise Matisse worked from the same model that posed for the sculpture Nu appuyé sur les mains, 1905 (Duthuit and de Guébriant, no. 17). Matisse was also alluding to a classical sculpture, Ariadne Sleeping, a second century Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture from Pergamon. Matisse introduced an expressive roughness into the pose of the classical odalisque, as Prof. Elsen has pointed out:
Matisse did violence to the tradition of studied refinements in the odalisque in his Reclining Figure with Chemise. The model's shift falls casually off her shoulder, and the garment obscures the supporting arm. In keeping with his taste for strenuous postures in passive situations, the model's left leg is pulled across the right leg, thrusting the hip into a severely prominent relief, and her left elbow juts into space. As in his paintings of the time with their somewhat additive figural disposition and tangential coordination, each section of the body, divisible at its flexible joints, is made clear, and only the chemise effects flow across the same areas. The equivalent of the divided touch in the Luxe, calme et volupté, which holds the work together overall, is the coarse modeling that plays counterpoint to the disjunctive silhouette. (in op. cit., pp. 69-70).
Matisse again referred to this reclining pose in his next major painting. Among the paintings and drawings that Matisse made in 1905-1906 in preparation for Bonheur de vivre, which he completed in early 1906 as the definitive large-scale masterwork of his Fauve period (coll. The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania), Monod-Fontaine has noted the importance of Nu couché à la chemise, which she has called a "truly transitional sculpture. It represents both a volumetric treatment of the figure placed in the foreground of Bonheur de vivre and accurately prefigures Reclining Nude I, which was modeled slightly later, in the winter of 1906-07" (op. cit., p. 10).
The latter (Nu couché I, Aurore; Duthuit and de Guébriant , no. 30), became the basis of a large painting of the same subject, which Matisse titled Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, and completed it in Collioure in early 1907 (The Cone Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art).
Matisse first used the reclining pose similar to that seen in Nu couché à la chemise in his painting Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904 (coll. Musée d'Orsay, Paris), an idyllic scene executed in a modified divisionist technique derived from Paul Signac and Henri Edmond Cross, in whose company Matisse had worked that summer in Saint-Tropez (see note to lot 317). The late Prof. Albert E. Elsen suggested that in modeling Nu couché à la chemise Matisse worked from the same model that posed for the sculpture Nu appuyé sur les mains, 1905 (Duthuit and de Guébriant, no. 17). Matisse was also alluding to a classical sculpture, Ariadne Sleeping, a second century Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture from Pergamon. Matisse introduced an expressive roughness into the pose of the classical odalisque, as Prof. Elsen has pointed out:
Matisse did violence to the tradition of studied refinements in the odalisque in his Reclining Figure with Chemise. The model's shift falls casually off her shoulder, and the garment obscures the supporting arm. In keeping with his taste for strenuous postures in passive situations, the model's left leg is pulled across the right leg, thrusting the hip into a severely prominent relief, and her left elbow juts into space. As in his paintings of the time with their somewhat additive figural disposition and tangential coordination, each section of the body, divisible at its flexible joints, is made clear, and only the chemise effects flow across the same areas. The equivalent of the divided touch in the Luxe, calme et volupté, which holds the work together overall, is the coarse modeling that plays counterpoint to the disjunctive silhouette. (in op. cit., pp. 69-70).
Matisse again referred to this reclining pose in his next major painting. Among the paintings and drawings that Matisse made in 1905-1906 in preparation for Bonheur de vivre, which he completed in early 1906 as the definitive large-scale masterwork of his Fauve period (coll. The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania), Monod-Fontaine has noted the importance of Nu couché à la chemise, which she has called a "truly transitional sculpture. It represents both a volumetric treatment of the figure placed in the foreground of Bonheur de vivre and accurately prefigures Reclining Nude I, which was modeled slightly later, in the winter of 1906-07" (op. cit., p. 10).
The latter (Nu couché I, Aurore; Duthuit and de Guébriant , no. 30), became the basis of a large painting of the same subject, which Matisse titled Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, and completed it in Collioure in early 1907 (The Cone Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art).