HENRI MATISSE - Tête de femme

 

HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954)

Tête de femme

signed ‘Henri Matisse’ (upper left)

oil on canvasboard

13¾ x 10¬ in. (34.9 x 27 cm.)

Painted in 1919 

With its vigorous brushwork and soft

tonalities, Tête de femme demonstrates

a distinct stylistic change in Henri

Matisse’s art at the end of the First

World War. Painted during the winter of

1918-19, the present work leaves behind

the sombre colours and highly angular

style the artist had adopted during the

war years in Paris and demonstrates his

return to a more traditionally fgurative

mode of representation, inspired by the

naturalism of artists such as Ingres,

Courbet and Renoir. Focusing principally

on the female fgure during this period,

the artist employed several professional

models to sit for him in the improvised

studio he established in his hotel in

Nice. Tête de femme focuses on one

such professional model, and represents

Matisse’s growing interest in the portrait

as a vehicle for artistic experimentation.

Faced with the prospect of another cold

and dismal winter in wartime Paris,

Matisse had decided to escape to the

Côte d’Azur for a few months towards

the end of 1917, arriving in Nice on 20

December in what was to become the

frst of a series of annual trips to the area.

His time in the South of France had a

signifcant impact on his art, with the

difused winter light of the Mediterranean

sparking a new creative energy in his

work. Living an almost hermitic lifestyle

devoid of distraction, Matisse used the

sojourn to devote himself entirely to

his art, spending large portions of his

day absorbed in painting and drawing

sessions. Perhaps most signifcantly

though, the move resulted in an extended

period of separation from the artist’s

family each year, which deprived him of

his regular models - his wife Amélie, and daughter Marguerite

- and forced him to hire local professionals in their place.

Although there was a shortage of young women willing to act

as artist’s models in Nice at the time, Matisse used his contacts

at the city’s school of art to source several suitable girls to sit

for him, and began to use these women as a medium through

which he could experiment with the representation of the

human fgure. Matisse later acknowledged their importance in

his art, saying: ‘My models are not simply extras on stage. They

are the principle theme of my work. I totally depend on them…’

(Matisse, quoted in T. Llorens, ‘Intimacy and Ornament’, in

Matisse 1917-1941, exh. cat., Madrid, 2009, p. 208). 

In this striking portrait Matisse focuses solely on the head and

shoulders of his model, capturing her from a slightly elevated

angle and allowing her visage to dominate the composition.

Her unfinching gaze holds the viewer’s attention and imbues

the painting with a sense of intimacy that belies the sitter’s

anonymous status. The artist had previously worked with the

same models repeatedly over an extended period of time,

depicting them in a variety of diferent costumes, poses and

attitudes to achieve an array of unique compositions. However,

the woman depicted in Tête de femme appears in only a

handful of Matisse’s paintings and drawings, all captured over

the winter of 1918-19. As a result of this brief partnership,

her identity remains a mystery to us, although it has been

suggested that she was the sister of Matisse’s principal model

during the following years, Antoinette Arnoud, with the two

sharing a strong physical likeness. 

However, representing the identity of the sitter in Tête de

femme was not of central importance to Matisse. Rather, the

artist wished to use his model as a conduit for experimentation,

allowing him to investigate form and colour in the human

fgure without the need to slavishly reproduce an exact

physical likeness. Using a professional model freed the artist

from the formal constraints of a traditional commissioned

portrait, as well as the emotional attachment which drove his

representations of his wife and daughter. In Tête de femme

Matisse focuses on the modelling of the woman’s fgure,

capturing a sense of weight and three-dimensionality in her

form. Writing to his wife from Nice, he described the new

importance of mass in his approach, explaining: ‘I look for the

density in things. Instead of reducing what I see to an outline,

I try to express volume and modelling’ (Matisse, quoted in H.

Spurling, Matisse: The Master, vol. II, London, 2005, p. 238).

The painting also demonstrates Matisse’s adoption of an

increasingly nuanced chromatic vocabulary in his art, inspired

by the spectrum of colours he encountered in Nice. Using

varying shades of pure colour, the artist captures the play of

light on his model’s skin in a subtle modulation of diferent

tones, built through a complex layering of paint. 

Matisse’s renewed approach to modelling and colour, so

evident in the present work, was a result of the artist’s growing

dissatisfaction with abstraction during the war years. Fearing

his art was becoming derivative and lifeless in its pursuit of

the abstract, the artist turned to a more classically descriptive

approach to painting, as a means of avoiding what he called

‘the drying up efect of pure abstraction’ (Matisse, quoted

in ibid., p. 222). Speaking to the Scandinavian art historian

Ragnar Hoppe in 1919, Matisse declared: ‘When you have

achieved what you want in a certain area, you must, when the

time comes, change course, search for something new… If I

had continued down the other road, which I knew so well, I

would have ended up as a mannerist. One must always keep

one’s eye, one’s feeling, fresh…’ (Matisse, quoted in J. Flam,

Matisse on Art, London, 1995, p. 75).