Nu debout

Throughout his career, in a variety of media, Henri Matisse repeatedly explored the formal and metaphorical potential of the female nude, either seated or standing, posed with her arms raised and clasped behind her head. “Fully exposing the naked figure, accentuating or exaggerating its forms, and stressing the sequence of complementary or opposing volumes,” Jed Morse has written, “the pose elicits a tension that serves as a hallmark of some of Matisse’s most radical inventions” (Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art, 2007, p. 142). In the present Nu debout, Matisse deftly renders his model in sweeping strokes of charcoal, filling the sheet with her supple form. Arms overstretched in a moment of stillness, she nevertheless brims with a vitality and nascent energy, the result of the estompe (a thick paper stick used to blend the charcoal strokes) charting the crested peaks and sloping valleys of her figure. The result is a sculptural presence, conveying the impression of the body struck by light.
In his 1939 text Notes of a Painter on his Drawing, Matisse explained that the “charcoal or stump drawing…allows me to consider simultaneously the character of the model, her human expression, the quality of surrounding light, the atmosphere and all that can only be expressed by drawing.” He went on to describe his approach to the model, “The emotional interest they inspire in me is not particularly apparent in the representation of their bodies, but often rather by the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper and which forms its orchestration, its architecture” (quoted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 130-132).