(Cateau-Cambrésis 1869–1954 Nice)
Nu, 1948, signed and dated H. Matisse avril 48, charcoal on paper, 60 x 40 cm, framed

With a written confirmation of Wanda de Guébriant, Paris, 19 May 2005, archive no N41, on the reverse of the work.

We are grateful to Georges Matisse, Archives Matisse, for his kind assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:
Estate of the artist
Pierre Matisse, New York
Galerie Berggruen (1963)
Galerie Loeb Krugier (1968)
Galerie Bellier, Paris (1988)
Sam Salz Collection (1988)
J. C. Anaf, Lyon, 23 October 1996, lot 219
De Baecque & Associés, 17 April 2015, lot 16
acquired from the above by the present owner

“I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator.”

Henri Matisse

Matisse considered his drawing to be a very intimate means of expression. The method of artistic execution – whether it was charcoal, pencil, crayon, etcher‘s burin, lithographic tusche or paper cut – varied according to the subject and personal circumstance. His favourite subjects were evocative or erotic – the female form, the nude figure or a beautiful head of a favourite model. Other themes relate to the real or imagined world of both Oceania and the Caribbean – the lagoons, the coral and the faces of beautiful women from these far-off lands. Still other subjects were inspired by classical mythology.
Matisse often made drawings to inform his paintings and sculptures, feeling that these drawings should be quick, gestural exercises that captured the form and emotion evoked in him by the subject. As the most direct expression of the artist’s thoughts, drawing often helped Matisse to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas.
In the late 1940s, as in this nude, his drawings become bolder, the contour line thicker, the forms more simplified and devoid of detail.
www.henri-matisse.net