The ''Blue Nudes'' is a series of color
lithographs by
Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known prim ...
made from cut-outs depicting nude figures in various positions. Restricted by his physical condition after his surgery for stomach cancer, Matisse began creating art by cutting and painting sheets of paper by hand and supervised the creation of the lithographs until his death in 1954.
''Blue Nude IV'', the first of the four nudes, took a notebook of studies and two weeks' work of cutting-and-arranging before the resulting artefact satisfied him. In the event, Matisse finally arrived at his favorite pose, for all four works—intertwining legs and an arm stretching behind the neck. The posture of the nude woman is like the posture of a number of seated nudes made in the first years of the 1920s, ultimately, the posture derives from the reposed figures of ''
Le bonheur de vivre''. The second in the series, ''Blue Nude II'', was completed in 1952.
Despite the flatness of paper, the cut-outs reflect Matisse's earlier sculptures in their tangible, relief-like quality, especially the sense of volume created by the overlapping of the cut-outs. ''Blue Nude I'', in particular, can be compared with sculptures such as ''La Serpentine'', from 1909.
The color blue signified distance and volume to Matisse. Frustrated in his attempts to successfully marry dominant and contrasting tones, the artist was moved to use solid slabs of single color early in his career, a technique that became known as
Fauvism
Fauvism /ˈfoʊvɪzm̩/ is the style of ''les Fauves'' (French language, French for "the wild beasts"), a group of early 20th-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the Representation (arts), repr ...
. The painted gouache cut-outs that compose the ''Blue Nudes'' were inspired by Matisse's collection of African sculpture and his visit to
Tahiti
Tahiti (; Tahitian ; ; previously also known as Otaheite) is the largest island of the Windward group of the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It is located in the central part of the Pacific Ocean and the nearest major landmass is Austra ...
, in 1930. He required another twenty years and a post-operative period of incapacity, before Matisse synthesized those African and Polynesian influences into this seminal series.
After his death, the works were printed in a special 1956 issue of ''
Verve'', entitled "Les Derniers Oeuvres de Matisse", though only the ones finished before his death bear his signature.
The series was later shown at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from October 2014 to February 2015 as part of the exhibition ''Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs''.
References
External links
*
''Blue Nude'' (Souvenir de Biskra)
Paintings by Henri Matisse
1952 paintings
Nude art
Paintings in Paris
Collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne
{{20C-painting-stub