Henri Matisse - Nude in Sunlit Landscape 1909
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Nude in Sunlit Landscape 1909
41x32cm oil/canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
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From the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA:
In March 1909, the collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned Henri Matisse to paint decorative panels for his Moscow home. That summer, the artist stayed at Cavalière, a small town on the Côte d’Azur in France. There, he posed a model, whom he had brought from Paris, outdoors and painted several works from life. Nude in a Forest (Nu dans un paysage ensoleillé) is almost certainly one of these. The small pink figure, arms at her sides and head inclined to the left, stands centered on the canvas like the central figure in Paul Cézanne’s Three Bathers (Trois baigneuses, 1879–82), which Matisse owned. The nude is framed and echoed by tree trunks, her feet nearly encircled by tan and pale yellow, representing a sunlit patch of ground. A sliver of warm blue sky points directly at the top of the model’s head. Space in the painting is deliberately flat; despite the avenue of tree trunks in a perspectival formation and perhaps some coloristic indications, no real feeling of recession into depth is achieved. The figure and her surroundings remain on the surface. Thus pushed forward and emphasized by formal devices, the rosy body of the relatively tiny nude is not lost among the more assertive blues, greens, yellows, and earth tones of the setting.
Joseph R. Wolin