Henri Matisse - NATURE MORTE AU LIERRE

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Henri Matisse
1869 - 1954
NATURE MORTE AU LIERRE
Signed Henri. Matisse and dated 1915 (lower right)
Charcoal and estompe on paper
29 5/8 by 22 1/8 in.
75.5 by 56.3 cm
Executed in 1915 
"Drawing does not depend on forms being copied exactly as they are in nature or on the patient assembling of exact details, but on the profound feeling of the artist before the objects that he has chosen, on which his attention is focused."

—Henri Matisse quoted in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 179

Nature morte au lierre of 1915 is an impressive large-scale work, combining the sensuousness and rounded forms of Matisse's celebrated Variations on a Still Life by de Heem (1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York) with a Cézanne-esque treatment of the picture plane. Although not a direct study for Matisse's variation of the de Heem painting, the present work incorporates many of the same artistic principles addressed in other seventeenth-century studies of this period. The bold outline and subtle shading created by the use of charcoal and estompe in the present work, combined with the imposing scale, result in a monumentality that transcends the medium of a work on paper. 
"The newly monumental version of organic form that Matisse discovered in this period (and which climaxed in the great still-life paintings of 1916) owes its particular density to the increased gravity of his line, but also to a change in the manner of his visual address to objects.... As with Cubist drawing, the intervals between the parts are as conclusively present as the parts themselves, for it is in those intervals that the rigorously defined space forces itself on our imagination. Of course, Matisse had always paid attention to the pictoriality of the white ground. But now it is tensely charged in quite a new way, as positive and negative areas interchange in expressive importance" (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, London, 1984, p. 68).
A combination of graceful, restrained lines and sensuously blended charcoal, Nature morte au lierre is a wonderful example of Matisse’s mature drawing style. Throughout the 1910s Matisse drew extensively, developing the estompe technique. This use of charcoal enabled Matisse to imbue his works with a masterful blend of smoky shadow and tremulous luminosity. The technique freed Matisse from the rigors of strict representation, creating a looser physicality that became an expression of feeling.
Pablo Picasso, Bouquet dans un vase, 1907, oil on canvas
Lucien Freud, Interior with plant, reflection listening, 1967-68, oil on canvas

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