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34

Property from a Private American Collection HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) étude pour

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:900,000.00 - 1,200,000.00 USD
Property from a Private American Collection HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) étude pour
Property from a Private American Collection
HENRI MATISSE
(1869-1954)
étude pour "Le chant" (Décoration pour la cheminée de Nelson A. Rockefeller)
signed and dated "Henri
Matisse 11/38" (lower right)
charcoal on paper
20 x 26 in. (50.8 x 66 cm)
drawn in Nice, November 1938
Estimate: $900,000-1,200,000 <p>Provenance
Estate of the Artist
Private Collection, France
Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner <p>Literature
Christian Zervos, "Dessins Récents de Henri Matisse," Cahiers d'Art (Henri Matisse. Dessin au fusain), 1939, no. 1-4, p. 18 (illustrated)
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, pp. 252 and 547 (illustrated, p. 478)
Lydia Delectorskya, L'apparent facilité, Henri Matisse: Peintures de 1935-1939, Paris, 1986, pp. 282-287 (illustrated, p. 282)
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Drawing was central to Henri Matisse's art, not merely as a study medium for his painting but more importantly as an independent means of expression. In his 1939 essay, Notes of a Painter on his Drawing, Matisse writes: "I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all as a means of expressing intimate feelings and descriptions of states of being...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" (quoted in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1973, p. 131).
Throughout Matisse's extraordinary career as painter, sculptor, and draftsman, his primary concern was with color. In 1937 Matisse shifted his attention from line drawings to charcoal, a medium that enabled the artist to unite color and drawing. Charcoal provided Matisse with a flexible medium because it allowed him to create atmospheric or "light" effects within the framework of his black and white compositions. étude pour "Le chant" certainly demonstrates Matisse's ability as a colorist. The tonal accents accomplished by his smudging and manipulating of the medium create a play of light and shadow across the sheet. As Matisse himself stated: "In spite of the absence of shadows or half-tones expressed by hatching, I do not renounce the play of values or modulations. I modulate with variations in the weight of line, and above all with the areas it delimits on the white paper. I modify the different parts of the white paper without touching them, but by their relationships" (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1984, p. 117).
The present charcoal is one of the most resolved and accomplished studies for Le chant, a painting commissioned by Nelson A. Rockefeller for the mantlepiece surround in his New York apartment (fig. 1). Begun in mid-November 1938 and completed in early December, the project was an ambitious undertaking for Matisse. Prior to the Rockefeller commission the artist had started to investigate the balancing and harmonizing of multiple figures within the same composition. In Le chant, Matisse employed four models in active relationships with one another, quite different from the static arrangements of paired figures he had depicted earlier in his career. He divided the canvas into two halves and arranged the four figures in graceful curves. The top half of the painting portrays the motif of two seated women, which Matisse had developed in his groundbreaking and abstracted painting of the same year, Le jardin d'hiver (Private Collection, USA).
The more dynamic lower section of Le chant, for which the present work served as a direct predecessor, portrays a sleeping figure resting her arm and head upon the "real" mantelpiece while a singing figure to her right uses the fireplace surround as a music stand. Matisse conflates the real and the imaginary in this section of the composition, creating balance between the painted/drawn image and its environmental setting. There appears to be an active dialogue between the two women in our image: as one sings, the other is lulled to sleep. It is also interesting to note in a discussion of our charcoal, that the singing figure wears the same decorative costume as Femme en bleu, Matisse's masterpiece from 1937 now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The sleeping figure is an early study for Matisse's 1939 painting, Le rêve (Private Collection, Paris).
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