Lot 11 : Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

Henri Matisse - 1869-1954

Auction Location: United States of America - 2005
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Artist or Maker:

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

Title:

Les marguerites

Description:

Les marguerites
signed 'Henri-Matisse' (lower right)
oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 28 3/4 in. (100.4 x 73.1 cm.)
Painted in 1919

Provenance:

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist, 25 September 1919).
Monteux fils, Limoges (acquired from the above, 13 October 1919).
Philippe Reichenbach, Paris.
Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zürich (acquired from the above, 1970).
Mr. and Mrs. Neison Harris, Chicago (acquired from the above, 29 October 1970).
By descent from the above to the present owner.

Exhibited:

New York, Acquavella Galleries, Henri Matisse, November-December 1973, no. 18 (illustrated in color).
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, November-March 1987, p. 299, no. 75 (illustrated; illustrated again in color, pl. 22).

Published:

E. Faure, J. Romains, C. Vildrac and L. Werth, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1920 (illustrated, pl. 35).
Mushakojo, Henri Matisse 1890-1939, Tokyo, 1939, p. 60 (illustrated, fig. 119).
G.-P. and M. Dauberville, Matisse, Paris, 1995, vol. II, p. 812, no. 343 (illustrated).

Notes:

Property from a Private American Collection

Matisse painted Les marguerites in his Issy-les-Moulineaux, home outside Paris during the summer of 1919, following his return from a second winter sojourn in Nice. This was the first summer since the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War. The gloom and cares of the war years were quickly fading. Matisse celebrated the revived hopes and joys of peacetime with a trilogy of brilliantly colored floral still-lifes, including the present painting, that are quintessentially French in their sensuousness and joie de vivre. But more importantly, Matisse was marking a change in his own life and art, as he responded to a new and irresistible current that swept over him at the age of fifty, set in motion by his recent stays in Nice. He found his senses to have been reawakened by the startling and radiant light of the Midi. A growing wave of contentment and satisfaction had come to fill his days and suffuse his paintings. In May 1919 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune gave Matisse his first solo exhibition since 1913. Comprised mostly of recent works, and many from Nice (fig. 1), the show served to confirm Matisse's position as the leading French painter of his time. Many commentators noted the change in his outlook. Les marguerites records this extraordinary passage, and points to the halcyon years of the artist's grand maturity that lay ahead.

Matisse first visited Nice in October 1917, hoping to avoid another cold and dismal winter in wartime Paris. He liked the Mediterranean light in winter--although it was less dazzling than in the summer, it created a more subtle array of colors. He wrote to the painter Charles Camoin in May 1918, "what I saw was of a color and softness of relationships that was truly moving. It seems as though it is a paradise that one does not have a right to analyze. Ah Nice is a beautiful place!" (quoted in J. Cowart, exh. cat., op. cit., 1986, p. 23).

The Midi was Cézanne's country, and Matisse discovered that the late master, the godfather of early 20th century modernism, had successfully conveyed in his paintings the light and color of his native landscape. An even more significant revelation for Matisse at this time, however, was his encounter with another master of the south, Renoir, who was then still living and painting in nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer. Matisse paid a visit to Renoir on the last day of 1917, and saw him several times again during the following year before returning north in late spring. Although Renoir had suffered from crippling arthritis for many years, he still painted every day except Sunday. Matisse admired the old man's fortitude and his unshakable dedication to art. Moreover, he was captivated by Renoir's innate sensuality, which was unyielding and irrepressible even in his final years. Jack Flam has observed of Matisse that "Renoir gave him the impetus to make new contact with his own sensuality. After twenty years of bourgeois family life, decades of being 'the doctor' and 'professor,' Matisse in his late forties seems to have wanted to learn how to be young again" (in Matisse, The Man and His Art, 1869-1918, Ithaca, 1986, p. 473).

Renoir inspired Matisse to turn again to the nude, this time in a way that was quite new to Matisse. He put aside his customary and nearly exclusive tendency toward formal analysis of his subjects, and yielded wholly to the seduction of a feminine physically, both in his models and his environment. He appeared to indulge in languid reveries, tinged with erotic fantasy, a key component in the orientalist tradition in which he now immersed himself. In these new surroundings Matisse inaugurated his celebrated series of odalisques. Matisse was also drawn to, and in part adapted, Renoir's late approach to painting, in which the master had created a style that was loose and airy in the Impressionist manner, but at the same time imbued with a sense of realistically full and ripe volume, fostering the timeless qualities essential to the realization of the classical ideal. A classicizing tendency was very much in the air at that time, as many artists turned away from the radical experimentation of the pre-war period to more conservative styles that looked to the past. Around 1920 Picasso also became strongly attracted to the classical qualities in Renoir's late work, well-represented in the inventory of his new dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Cézanne had been the acknowledged progenitor of pre-war avant-garde painting; now Renoir, who died in 1919, had succeeded him, pointing the way to a more relaxed and hedonistic manner in painting at a time when a war-weary nation was eager to leave its recent trials behind, and to enjoy its customary peacetime pursuits and pleasures once more.

Matisse returned to Paris from his first winter in Nice in June or July 1918, and went south again in November of that year. Heading back home to Issy-les-Moulineaux in mid-June 1919 to spend the summer there with his family--his wife and children did not stay with him during these early periods in Nice--Matisse was determined to bring the new enlivening spirit of the south with him, and he did something rather daring and unprecedented in his life. He brought from Nice his eighteen-year-old model, Antoinette Arnoux, intending that she stay with his family so that he might continue his figure paintings without interruption. Antoinette had posed for his celebrated paintings and drawings of a model in a plumed hat done in Nice in late 1918 and early 1919. With her present, Matisse pursued his interest in using North African costumes in his pictures (fig. 2) and expanded his use of ornamental backgrounds, drawing on his extensive collection of textiles, wall hangings, folding screens and carpets. In the paintings Matisse had executed the previous summer in Issy-les-Moulineaux and his Paris studio, he had used bare, unadorned backgrounds; henceforth he would integrate his sitters or still-life subjects into a more detailed and evocative interior space.

The largest painting that Matisse painted that summer at Issy-les-Moulineaux was Le thé dans le jardin (fig. 3), in which he posed Antoinette (seen at left) and his daughter Marguerite (wearing her familiar black choker, seated at right). Matisse was proud of the garden that he maintained on the grounds of his villa--it was yet another link to the color, light and fertile environment of the South. His garden became the inspiration for Les marguerites and two companion floral still-lives of roughly similar dimensions, a painting which he titled Fleurs, 14 juillet (Dauberville, no. 342) to commemorate the first Bastille Day that France celebrated following the end of the war, and Les pivots--Feu d'artifice (fig. 4), in which the spray of smaller flowers shoot outwards like a holiday fireworks display. Ragnar Hoppe, a Swedish art historian who interviewed Matisse in June of that year, following the close of the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, quoted the artist as saying, "I need space around me, large dimensions, distance, and that's why I have built myself a studio out in my villa at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where I work on all my decorative projects. There, too, I have a glorious garden with lots of flowers, which for me are by far the best lessons in color composition. The flowers often give me impressions of color that are indelibly burnt onto my retina. Later, when I stand palette in hand before a composition and know only approximately which color I should apply, a memory like that may appear in my mind's eye, and come to my aid, give me a clue. In that way, I too become a naturalist, if you call it being a naturalist to listen to one's memories and to the selective instinct that is closely related to all creative talent" (in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 77).

Each of the three floral still-life paintings makes use of decorative wall-hangings or standing screens as backdrops in both Les marguerites and Les pivots. Matisse employed the same screen, with fabrics bearing two different designs alternating with material of a plain blue color tacked over joined wooden frames. The artist's use of these decorative props betokens the metamorphosis that was taking place in his art during this period. By contrast, in the earlier still-life Bouquet de fleurs mélangées, painted at Issy-les-Moulineaux in either 1916 or 1917, Matisse employed a flat, loosely brushed, neutral gray background (fig. 5). In the 1919 still-life compositions Matisse appears to have relished the juxtaposition of wild, effusive organic forms, which seem to explode against a backdrop of rigid geometry. The latter element is a residual expression of the abstract tendency seen in major compositions of the wartime period, such as La leçon de piano (fig. 6), painted at Issy-les-Moulineaux only three summers previously, in which Matisse employed geometrical elements set against a gray background. Indeed, the transformation from the austerity of the wartime style to the new warmth and hedonism of the post-war Nice manner may be traced through the pictures painted during this three year period, with Les marguerites and its brace of companions standing Janus-like, looking both backwards and forwards, and forming a lynch-pin in this evolving process.

The contrast of elements in Les marguerites, with its play of detail against a flat, more simply devised space, represents a somewhat different current in Matisse's work than that seen in his paintings done in Nice. Indeed, Les marguerites seems to look beyond the decorative richness and the realistic elaboration of space in the Nice interiors to the more reductionistic synthesis of form that characterizes Matisse's compositions of the 1930s and thereafter. When Jean Cocteau first viewed Matisse's recent Nice paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, he thought that Matisse had turned to "working without underlying discipline, without the geometrics of Cézanne and the old masters" (quoted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 175). Cocteau criticized Matisse for looking more like Bonnard or Vuillard, which he considered a retrograde step to the Impressionism of the past. In fact, Matisse had visited Bonnard in Antibes on Armistice Day in November 1918, was on friendly terms with him, and was looking at the rich and vivid surfaces that had by then become this painter's signature style.

Cocteau had perhaps judged Matisse prematurely--he might have revised his opinion had he been given the opportunity to view the strongly realized paintings from the summer of 1919, which allow a more complete picture of Matisse's direction at this juncture, in which the artist was seeking a meeting of "northern" and "southern" styles. When discussing this period with André Verdet in 1951, Matisse said, "I was coming out of long, wearying years of effort, after many inner conflicts, during which I had given the best of myself to bring those researches to the point of achieving what I hoped would be an unprecedented creation. A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colors and forms, in which the arabesque strove to establish its supremacy. From this duality issued works that, overcoming my inner constraints, were realized in the union of contrasts." (quoted in J. Flam, ed., op. cit., 1995, pp. 271-271).

(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, La boîte à violon ouverte, 1918-1919.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 23659278
(fig. 2) Henri Matisse, Femme vêtue à l'orientale, 1919. Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum. BARCODE 23657373
(fig. 3) Henri Matisse, Le thé dans le jardin, 1919. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. BARCODE 23659285
(fig. 4) Henri Matisse, Les pavots--Feu d'artifice, 1919. Detroit Institute of Arts. BARCODE 23657366
(fig. 5) Henri Matisse, Bouquet de fleurs mélangées, 1916 or 1917. San Diego Museum of Art. BARCODE 23659292
(fig. 6) Henri Matisse, La leçon de piano, 1916. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 23659308

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