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Henri Matisse - Draped Nude

Orientation

This painting depicts a female nude lounging in a green armchair. As we look at the painting, the chair is facing us but she is sitting at an angle across it with her head to our right and her legs to our left so that the left side of her body is closest to us. Her right arm is raised above her shoulder and rests along the back of the chair. She leans on her left arm and this rests from elbow to wrist along the chair's arm leaving her hand to hang limply over the edge.

Her right leg is draped over the opposite chair arm and her left leg is bent in front of the seat. We assume her left foot touches the floor although we are unable to see it as the bottom of the picture cuts off her leg at the ankle. She naked except for a black necklace, a green bracelet on her left wrist and a violet patterned robe that hangs open, only covering her shoulders and the tops of her arms. Behind the chair to the left of the model's head are two large green leaves, similar to those of a cheese plant. The floor of the room is bright red and the wall behind a dark grey. The scale of this painting is intimate, you could comfortably hold it in your hands. End of Orientation

The female nude is a subject closely associated with Matisse. He created hundreds of variations in paintings, drawings, cut-outs and sculptures. He could convey with just a few lines and colours both physical forms and an emotional mood. When asked how long it took him to create these work he answered 'a lifetime'. Decades of intense visual interrogation enabled him to distil an image to its essential elements and to make this process look effortless.

Draped Nude is the second in a series of four paintings of this subject. There are very few compositional elements - a nude, a chair, the floor, a wall and a plant. Yet this painting is an audacious and complex interplay between the opposing qualities of depth and flatness, both of which are achieved not by perspective, but by colour, outline and pattern.

Raised Image 1
This is an image of the woman in the painting. Towards the top right corner of the page is her head. The raised area is her hair surrounding her oval face. Her eyes, eyebrows and nose are drawn in a few simple lines. Below her head are two ribbed areas with scalloped edges. This is her robe that lies open either side of her body and hangs down below her bent arm in the area bottom right. Between the two sides of the robe are her breasts and below them, a mark for her belly button. The sinuous line that traces the outline of the left breast and the swell of her belly ends at her groin. There it meets a horizontal line denoting the top of her thigh that then bends at the knee and descends down her shin. The line of the back of her leg runs parallel and below. Above this leg, her other leg is represented by the two more angled lines. Next to the left hand shoulder are two drooping lines, this is her arm. The other arm to the right of the image breaks up the ribbing. This arm ends in a hand whose fingers hang downwards. End of Raised Image Description

The nude hovers between being a flat pattern and a rounded physical presence because Matisse uses contradictory techniques to represent her body. In places the soft peach-pink flesh tones are modulated where her face and breasts catch the light, or where the top of her thigh recedes into shadow under her robe. These body parts have a solid, three- dimensional quality. However, other parts, like the curve of her belly or the sweep of her left thigh, are described by a dark, sinuous outline rendering them flat, like a drawing.

More extraordinary still, Matisse uses passages of shorthand that make no attempt at physical accuracy. For instance, immediately next to the strongly defined stomach, her right thigh is just an amorphous blur. It's as if by drawing our attention to the belly, the thigh has slipped out of focus. This leg then bends unnaturally to a foot that trails away into unpainted canvas. Equally, her left hand looks like a flipper, just a patch of flesh-coloured paint overlaid with lines to indicate fingers. Her other hand lacks even this degree of definition and dribbles away into a pink trotter. However, these anomalies do not effect our reading of the scene because Matisse's emphasis is on establishing a mood, not biological accuracy.

He uses contradictory technique in the robe too. The intensity of the violet paint fluctuates, implying folds in the material as it falls over the body. However the robe's floral pattern is drawn in grey lines like calligraphy over the top of the colour, completely undisturbed by the implied movement of the fabric.

Raised Image 2
The figure is as before. She is surrounded by a large raised area which is the chair. End of Raised Image Description

This oscillating sense of depth and flatness is most extreme in the painting of the chair. Without the nude the chair would not be recognisable. It would resemble a rug hanging in front of us, for it has no solidity and no recognisable elements, such as arms. We read it as a chair in order to explain the model's pose, which is only possible if she were sitting down.

The chair is painted as a large flat patch of pale mint green over which Matisse has painted a pattern of short grey horizontal lines. These might imply a texture, a throw or the contours of the chair. We can't be sure. The importance of the chair is as an abstract passage of colour and pattern that separates the nude from the stronger colours of the floor and wall. Matisse emphasises this functional patterning by leaving a slim gap of unpainted canvas between each area of colour. By dislocating the colours and revealing the canvas beneath, he reminds the viewer that this is a composition in paint, not a simulation of reality.

Raised Image 3
The figure and chair are as before. Two horizontal lines indicate the bottom of the wall. One is half way down on the right by her bent elbow. The other is on the left near her bent top leg. The spotted area surrounded by looping lines at the top of the image is a plant. End of Raised Image Description

Matisse's understanding of colour was extraordinary, like a visual perfect pitch. Here they precisely balance and harmonise. The soft green of the chair complements the pink of the nude, while the hot orange-red of the floor is in perfect balanced with the sharp green of the plant. Finally, dark grey binds the work together, providing both a recessive background and the strong outlines that pattern surface of the canvas.

Matisse uses alternating areas of pattern to indicate spatial depth, a technique developed from his study of Persian miniatures. The patterned robe lies on top of the plain skin of the nude. She sits on top of the patterned chair that is in turn in front of the plain floor and wall. The two large leaves behind the chair help differentiate the floor from the wall.

With the luminous, harmonious colours and the repeating arabesque curves, Matisse imbues this painting with a mood of sensuousness and languor. Yet the dialogue between colour and pattern means that the painting whilst calm, is not static.

In the 1930s when Draped Nude was painted, Matisse was photographing the many adjustments he made to his canvases as he worked on them. The evolutionary process would start with a pose created in the studio. This would then undergo radical simplification. Colours, poses and scale would be altered and additional elements like patterns or still life objects would be added. The aim of this reworking was to create a harmonious balance between the different aspects of the composition. It is this sense of order that gives the paintings their effortless quality. Matisse said 'I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime, which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost me.'

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