Deux femmes

Henri Matisse’s drawing Deux femmes, executed in Nice in the summer of 1938, represents a significant moment in the artist’s production between the wars. The work belongs to a sequence of related drawings and oils in which Matisse explored compositional ideas that would eventually culminate in one of his major undertakings of that year: the over-mantel decoration for Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment in New York. By the late 1930s, Matisse had returned with renewed intensity to the graphic arts, creating works that distilled his vision into its most essential component: the contour.
The composition of Deux femmes is characteristically economical yet charged with sensuality and rhythm. The two sitters—Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse’s devoted studio assistant and model, and her cousin, Princess Hélène Galitzine—are seated in close proximity, their figures defined almost exclusively by sweeping, continuous outlines. Through the arabesque of the line, Matisse conveys volume, intimacy, and the palpable rapport between the women, without recourse to shading or descriptive detail. The choice of pen and India ink allowed him to achieve a balance of firmness and spontaneity: each line, at once deliberate and fluid, testifies to his exceptional control of gesture and his confidence in the expressive capacity of drawing. In this respect, the work echoes Matisse’s conviction, expressed in his writings, that drawing is not merely preparatory but a fully autonomous art form.
Executed in Nice, where Matisse had resided since the late 1910s, the drawing reflects the Mediterranean lightness and sensual atmosphere that permeated his work in this period. Nice provided him with a setting conducive to representations of women at leisure, often posed in domestic interiors or idyllic surroundings. In Deux femmes, the interlaced poses of Lydia and Hélène evoke themes of companionship, languor, and repose. Such motifs recur throughout Matisse’s œuvre of the 1930s, culminating in the celebrated series of ‘odalisques’ and seated female figures that integrate drawing, painting, and decorative design.
The date of June 1938 situates this drawing on the cusp of the Second World War, a moment when Matisse, despite the looming political crisis, maintained his exploration of harmony, serenity, and beauty through art. In contrast to the anxiety of the times, Deux femmes offers a vision of calm intimacy and aesthetic clarity. The drawing thus encapsulates Matisse’s enduring pursuit of an art that, as he famously declared, might serve as ‘a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair.’ (J. Flam, Matise on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 38).
As part of this larger group of interrelated works, Deux femmes demonstrates how Matisse used drawing both as a site of experimentation and as an end in itself. It embodies the fusion of sensual subject matter and radical simplicity of execution that defined his mature style, while also pointing forward to one of his most important decorative commissions of the decade.