HENRI MATISSE|10 MIN READ

A Guide to Henri Matisse Artworks

These are images you have probably seen before, and each one changed as it was made. A new model arrived in the Nice studio in 1935, and the painting of her asleep was photographed at every stage, so the decisions behind it can still be followed.

WRITER Moryarty

Happiness by Matisse — Henri Matisse, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henri Matisse is usually introduced through his periods: the Fauve years, the decorative interiors, the cut-outs of the last decade. The work itself never moved in periods. A pose, a sleeve and a sheet of blue recur across his painting, prints and cut paper, and the six Henri Matisse artworks here trace that recurrence from 1935 to 1952. Each of the six stories tells who sat for the work, how it was revised or printed, and which museum or collection now holds it.

The story runs from a new model in the Nice studio in 1935 to the four Blue Nudes cut in 1952. Photography is what lets us follow it: Matisse had his canvases photographed state by state from 1935 onward as a way of checking work in progress, and the states survive for Le Rêve and for La Blouse roumaine, a painting made five years after Le Rêve. Prints then carried the work beyond the easel, with Edmond Vairel printing the Jazz plates in the Linel gouaches used for the maquettes and Mourlot printing the Nice poster in Paris. Museums now hold these works: the Centre Pompidou holds the two paintings, the Le cirque maquette and two of the Blue Nudes, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York has the Nice lithograph.

Le Rêve and the new model who changed Matisse's work

Matisse began Le rêve (1935) in Nice on 1 April 1935 and finished it on 14 May. Those six weeks stand at the start of something larger: 1935 was the year Lydia Delectorskaya began posing for him every day, and the woman asleep in this painting is her, in a pose she would return to again and again. By the end of her years with Matisse she had sat for more than a hundred drawings and sketches and about ninety paintings. The relaxed figure here is an early work in that long collaboration.

The Centre Pompidou's record of the picture notes that the meeting with this particular model gave Matisse a different vision, and that her relaxed pose is already present in the very first drawing he made of her. The serenity the museum finds in the face spreads through the whole canvas.

Six photographed states of the painting survive, and they record the substantial revision. State by state, the figure grew larger in the picture until it extended beyond the edge of the canvas.

Its companion, painted at the same time, was Le Nu rose, the canvas the Centre Pompidou calls the year's most important and the one now in the Baltimore Museum of Art. The museum reads Le rêve as a step toward that larger picture. The two share the checked divan fabric and blue paired with pink. In the museum's description of the final form, the pink body appears as a shape on the blue ground, and the blue elements of the background stand as shapes in their own right.

The picture then lived a life that can be followed in the documents. In 1947 it travelled from the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York to an exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. Twenty-one years later, at the 1968 Matisse retrospective in the Hayward Gallery in London, it hung under the title The Dream. At that time it was in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Matisse.

In 1979 the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris bought it, and it has been part of the Centre Pompidou collection since. A second, different painting called Le Rêve followed in 1940, so the 1935 date is what identifies this one.

How an embroidered Romanian blouse became La Blouse roumaine

The Centre Pompidou's record notes that Matisse collected craft textiles and was moved by the graphic beauty of their motifs. The interest is visible in pen drawings published in Cahiers d'art in 1936, where the model already wears a blouse with wide embroidered sleeves. A museum text reproduced by Sarah Aaronson records that the blouses behind this group of works came from his friend Pallady. Romanian peasant blouses had been in vogue in 1920s Paris, partly because Queen Marie of Romania wore them.

He painted The Romanian Blouse (1940) at the Hôtel Régina in Nice between December 1939 and April 1940. The original model was Lydia Delectorskaya, though other women have been proposed over the years as the inspiration, among them Elvira Popescu, Elena Văcărescu, Anna de Noailles and Marthe Bibesco. At first the painting had a flowered background and a model with brown curls and coils in the fashion of the day, wearing what Matisse called “a beautiful old Romanian blouse, embroidered in old-red cross-stitch”.

Matisse had his paintings photographed state by state as far back as 1935, and this canvas gave the habit its fullest record: every state was fixed on film as he went. As the work advanced, the decor disappeared, the patterns simplified, and the colours settled into flat areas, until a plain oval took the place of the model's features. What didn't disappear was the blouse. The Centre Pompidou calls the embroidered decoration the painter's real subject here, and that's the picture's quiet paradox: the painting started with the woman as its subject and ended with the blouse as its subject.

When the painting was exhibited, the photographs were hung next to it. In December 1945 the new Galerie Maeght opened its Paris programme with six Matisse paintings, its first event in the city, and this canvas hung with the dated photographs of its thirteen stages, framed like canvases in their own right.

François Campaux then turned the photographs into a film that shows them one after another, so the making of the painting can be followed step by step.

Grande odalisque à la culotte bayadère - Henri Matisse — JackyM59, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Matisse's flat on the boulevard Montparnasse, the canvas hung symmetrically with the 1940 painting also titled Le Rêve, one on each side of an older work. The picture reached the national collections in two steps: first as a temporary deposit, replacing a painting that had gone out on loan, and then as a gift, by the artist's declaration of 21 October 1949. The State recorded the attribution in 1953, and La Blouse roumaine has belonged to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, ever since.

The painting has had a second career in fashion. Yves Saint Laurent named a 1981 collection La Blouse roumaine, and Jean Paul Gaultier and Tom Ford have both built collections on its image. With the Centre Pompidou closed for renovation, the canvas is travelling to the H'ART Museum in Amsterdam for the Chez Matisse exhibition, only the second time the Pompidou has lent it.

The Circus and Tériade's plans for Jazz

Tériade, the Greek-born publisher whose real name was Efstratios Eleftheriades, had proposed a colour book to Matisse by the summer of 1941, describing the idea as a modern manuscript with paintings. The book that became Jazz first had another title, and the image now known as The circus (1947) is one of its plates.

By then Matisse's circumstances had changed sharply. A cancer diagnosis in 1941, and the surgery that followed, left him chair- and bedbound, and he was 74 when the book got under way. He couldn't paint or sculpt as before, so he divided the work between himself and assistants: assistants painted sheets of paper with gouache, and Matisse cut into them. The scissors took over from the brush, and the paper could be worked from a chair.

The maquette of the circus page is dated July 1946 and is made the way all the Jazz images are: gouache-painted paper, cut and glued onto paper mounted on canvas. It may have been intended for the book's cover, though the records treat that as a possibility rather than a settled fact. What is certain is its final position: plate II, the first full-page image a reader meets in Jazz.

So many of the early images showed circus performers that the book was first planned as Le Cirque. Then subjects that had nothing to do with the circus joined them, and the title changed to Jazz. The images, he said, had grown out of what he called crystallised memories of circuses, folktales and voyages. The circus page shows why the first title made sense: a broad blue field, a black acrobat in a slanted white space, a yellow strip with scattered red and black letters, and orange letters falling through the blue.

The printed plates had to stay faithful to the colours of his cut-outs: that was Matisse's one condition. Tériade chose pochoir, stencil printing, which could print with the Linel gouaches already on the maquettes. The colourist Edmond Vairel carried out that printing, and Draeger Frères printed Matisse's handwritten text pages.

Jazz appeared on 30 September 1947 in two forms: 250 books, with the plates set among the artist's handwritten text, and 100 portfolios of the prints alone. The Art Institute of Chicago bought its impression of the circus page in May 1948 from the dealer Pierre Berès, who had received it from the artist and the publisher. The original maquette, the object Matisse actually cut, entered the Centre Pompidou in 1985 by dation, a transfer accepted in lieu of tax, as part of the Jazz maquettes.

Nice, Travail et Joie from a still life to a tourism poster

The Nice tourist office asked Matisse to design a poster promoting the city, according to the vintage poster dealer Galerie 123. The Library of Congress records the 1947 poster as published by the Syndicat d'Initiative de Nice and the Union Méditerranéenne pour l'art moderne.

For the image he didn't paint something new. According to Galerie 123, Nice, Work and Joy reuses Matisse's 1947 painting Nature morte aux grenades, Vence. The poster adds his handwritten words "Nice, Travail & Joie" to the painted image. The palms, the fruit and the plate are a still life first; the lettering turns them into an invitation.

The lithographic poster was printed in Paris by the Mourlot workshop.

One published impression ended up in a collection that might surprise: the lithograph sits in the Architecture and Design department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a gift of G. E. Kidder Smith.

How Matisse made Nu bleu II

Nu bleu II belongs to the four Blue Nudes of 1952. He made them in Nice, in the spacious studio of the Hôtel Régina, and he made them fast: Nu bleu I, Nu bleu II and Nu bleu III came one after another, each within the space of a few hours. The numbers don't follow the order in which the works were made.

What the number also hides is how much drawing stood behind the cutting. Before the series came a period of frustration. Matisse stopped the scissors, drew a seated female nude over and over, and only then returned to the cutting. The pose itself went back decades, through seated figures he had explored in painting and sculpture: Nu assis, Olga (1910) and the second version of Vénus à la coquille (1932).

Portrait of Henri Matisse 1933 May 20 — Carl Van Vechten, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Lydia Delectorskaya, who was beside him for the series, recalled that each Blue Nude was cut on a different day, in one stroke of the scissors, in ten or fifteen minutes at most. The Centre Pompidou records that Nu bleu I, Nu bleu II and Nu bleu III were each made in the space of a few hours.

The openings between the shapes mark the joints of the body and give the flat paper a sense of volume, as when one leg, bent, crosses in front of the other leg's thigh. Cut from one sheet, the figure lets you imagine those gaps closing back together. The interlocking blue cut shapes sit on a warm beige ground, their edges sharply defined.

Nu bleu II entered the Centre Pompidou in 1984 and is held today by the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris. The 2014 survey Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, presented jointly by MoMA and Tate Modern, included Nu bleu II.

Why Nu bleu III counts as a finished artwork

Nu bleu III, like its two neighbours in the sequence, came together in a few hours in 1952. The sheet is signed and dated H MATISSE 52.

The Centre Pompidou, which owns the piece, makes the point plainly: in the Blue Nudes the cut-out method remains fully visible, as an art form in its own right. The edges keep the trace of the scissors, the separate shapes keep their spaces, and the deep blue silhouette reads at once as a body and as a piece of cut paper.

The museum bought Nu bleu III in 1982, and the original has been in the Musée national d'art moderne collection in Paris since.

All four Blue Nudes were reunited at the Grand Palais in Matisse, 1941–1954, which opened on 15 June 2018.

For a calm room at home, such as a bedroom, the sleeping figure in Le Rêve is the one we'd hang. If one of these six has shifted how you see a wall in your own home, our Henri Matisse collection gathers the cut-outs, the blouse and the sleeping figure in one place.

Did you know?

In 1952 Matisse made the 16-metre frieze La Piscine for his own pleasure.
In the summer of 1952 Matisse and Lydia Delectorskaya went to a public pool in Cannes simply to watch the divers.
The sculptor Constantin Brancusi was famous for turning up at Montparnasse parties dressed as a Romanian peasant.
At the Hôtel Régina, a wide strip of white paper was fixed around the burlap-coated walls of his dining room, just above his head height.
La Blouse roumaine appears under other titles in the records, among them Jeune fille: la blouse roumaine, La blouse paysanne and La Blouse paysanne roumaine, fond rouge.
Matthew Gale, Tate's head of displays, has noted that Matisse's cut-outs were seen as infantile in the artistic climate of their own time.
Matisse also made lithographs titled Nu bleu, based on the cut-out figure studies. He was halfway through the series when he died in 1954.

Questions about Matisse's art

What is Henri Matisse's art style? Matisse was a leader of the Fauves, the group of Paris painters who freed colour from having to describe things and let it carry the picture on its own. Colour, line and flat pattern stayed with him for the rest of a long life. The cut-outs are the late form of the same impulse: the gouache supplied the colour, and the scissors supplied the line.

How did Henri Matisse make his cut-outs? His assistants painted sheets of paper with gouache first, and Matisse then cut directly into the colour with scissors.

What was Henri Matisse's illness? Matisse was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1941. Surgery followed. Afterwards he made art by cutting painted sheets of paper by hand, the method behind the Blue Nudes.

Why is La Blouse roumaine so famous? Partly because its making was made public. The thirteen photographed stages hung beside the finished canvas at Galerie Maeght's first Paris exhibition in 1945, and François Campaux's film let people watch the painting simplify itself. Then fashion took it up: Yves Saint Laurent named a 1981 collection after it. Matisse himself kept returning to the subject, painting ten versions between 1939 and 1945.

Where can I see Matisse's Blue Nudes? Nu bleu II and Nu bleu III are both in Paris, in the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou. The four were reunited at the Grand Palais for the exhibition Matisse, 1941–1954, and at Tate Modern the Cut-Outs show placed side by side the largest number of Blue Nudes ever exhibited together.

How are our Matisse posters made? Each artwork is restored by hand, keeping its original design and colours. It's printed in our Barcelona workshop on 230 gsm fine art matte paper with archival pigment inks. Our prices stay accessible because we believe art shouldn't be only for people with high incomes. Details on orders, frames and delivery are in the FAQ.

About the author

Moryarty was founded in 2015 and has more than 2,000 vintage posters, found in museums, libraries and collections. Each artwork is restored by hand without changing its colours. It's printed in-house in Barcelona on fine art matte paper. Matisse's flat colour and cut edges reward that care more than most posters do. We write about the works because their histories are half the pleasure of hanging them.

Sources

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