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Overview
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)) was a French artist, famous for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker (as here) and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts tin the opening decades of the 20th century. Although he was initially labelled a 'Fauve' (wild beast), by the 1920s he was being hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a central figure in modern art.
Model in Repose is related to a study for the painting Nude with a Green Shawl (c. 1920), and was the work that revived Matisse's interest in lithography. Rather than drawing on transfer paper, he worked directly on the stone. The soft, lithographic crayon beautifully captures the volumes, textures, and patterns of the model's body, curtain, and fabric of the chaise longue and cushion. Matisse was interested in allowing his models to find poses that were natural, rather than artificially positioned, although he was by no means the first artist to do so. He said: "When I take a new model, I intuit the pose that will best suit her from her unselfconscious attitudes of repose, and then I become the slave of that pose." As Matisse's favoured subject matter of this period in particular was slave-like odalisques (concubines) in harem like interiors, one has to admire his wit - or Gallic gall!
The lithograph is one of an edition of 525 that were published in 1922 by Edmond Frapier, of the Galérie Royale des Peintres-Graveurs, Paris, entitled Essai sur l'histoire de la lithographie en France. Les Peintures lithographes de Manet à Matisse. Album de lithographies originales.
See:
Indiana University Art Museum, 'Model in Repose...', https://artmuseum.indiana.edu/online/highlights/view/entries/739
Wikipedia, 'Henri Matisse', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018