{"id":57830,"date":"2023-05-05T14:43:42","date_gmt":"2023-05-05T12:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.centrobotin.org\/?page_id=57830"},"modified":"2024-03-20T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T12:46:10","slug":"henry-matisse-femme-espagnole","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.centrobotin.org\/en\/henry-matisse-femme-espagnole\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Matisse Femme Espagnole"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Henri<\/strong><\/p>\n

Femme Espagnole<\/strong>, 1917.
\nOil on board. 67 x 55 cm<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018Femme Espagnole\u2019, a painting made by Matisse in Paris in 1917, in his studio overlooking Notre Dame on the Quai St Michel, was actually of an Italian professional model called Laurette, here dressed up in an \u2018exotic\u2019 costume for the purposes of this painting. Laurette was depicted in many guises and poses in the approximately fifty paintings executed over a period of approximately a year from 1916 to 1917. We know that Laurette had a sister, Anna, or Annette, who sometimes appeared alongside her, but beyond that we know very little about them\u2014not even a surname. Sometimes, Laurette\u2019s name was even spelt Lorette, suggesting in the case of both sisters a degree of unfamiliarity uncommon for Matisse, whose principal female models until this time had been friends and collectors, including the legendary Gertrude Stein, his wife Am\u00e9lie, their children, two sons, and his beloved Marguerite, his earlier daughter by another woman.<\/p>\n

Laurette had been recommended to Matisse by his friend, the painter Georgette Agutte, by this time a \u2018fauve\u2019 artist herself. They met in 1891, when he was studying in the atelier of Gustave Moreau, and they remained good friends. Of course, in 1916\/17, France was still at the very centre of the seemingly endless horrific World War I. Despite many ups and downs, Matisse had become a successful and notoriously \u2018uncompromising\u2018 painter of many radical art-history-changing images. These had announced themselves to the world with the radical and wildly coloured portrait of his wife, \u2018Woman in a Hat\u2019 (1905), which, once seen in a public exhibition in Paris, led him to be perceived indeed as the most outrageous of the \u2018fauves\u2019 (wild beasts), alongside Derain.<\/p>\n

However, after the war started, Matisse had been largely cut off from his prominent, almost exclusively foreign, supporters in Germany, Denmark, Britain, America, and Russia\u2014principally Serge Shchukin. In his other studio outside Paris, in Issy-les-Moulineaux, he had still been executing large \u2018difficult\u2019 paintings, such as \u2018Bathers by a River\u2019 (1909\u20131916), and the \u2018the Moroccans\u2019 (1915\u20131916), thinking through issues raised by Picasso\u2019s Cubism. Still for Matisse, colour was as central an issue as volume and form is to modern painting.<\/p>\n

He may have wished to find a model to execute more \u2018sellable\u2019 and smaller paintings at this difficult time. Laurette proved ideal for Matisse with her jet-black eyes and long hair, as well as her obvious delight in dressing up, being semi- or even fully naked, or even posing in normal clothes. She would strike endless different poses sitting on chairs, lying on beds, or even on the floor. Laurette dressed here as a \u2018Spanish Girl in a Mantilla\u2019 can be seen in part as a recollection of a true fauvist \u2018Spanish\u2019 painting Matisse did back in 1908, now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. But in this later painting here, the \u2018all over\u2019 calibration of colour is far more delicate\u2014even refined. The dark green background has equal significance in the painting in contrast to the thin pink-greyish flesh tones of the model herself, dressed up in the dull yellow of her d\u00e9collet\u00e9 day dress, over which falls the rich, black, almost inky calligraphic execution of the mantilla. Her black eyes and lashes and the falling lock of hair, even the touch of \u2018abstract\u2019 red, signifying a rose in her hair, perfectly define Matisse\u2019s obsession with finding a true balance between human, usually female, character representation and the abstracting possibilities of the medium of paint.<\/p>\n

At Christmas in 1917, Matisse was to head by himself\u2014sans his wife\u2014to the South of France, to Marseilles. Ultimately, of course, he would travel long-term to Nice, where the lessons he learnt from painting Laurette, whom he was not to see again, would inform his paintings of a succession of female models. In the final episode of his career, during World War II, he became too ill to paint as such, and he found for himself the way of addressing the all-important issue of colour in his miraculous cut-outs. Looking at this gentle, characterful painting in all its sophisticated simplicity, one can almost sense an anticipation of so much of what was to come.<\/p>\n

Norman Rosenthal<\/strong>, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London between 1977 and 2008 and expert on Henri Matisse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Femme Espagnole, 1917. Oil on board. 67 x 55 cm   \u2018Femme Espagnole\u2019, a painting made by Matisse in Paris in 1917, in his studio overlooking Notre Dame on the Quai St Michel, was actually of an Italian professional model called Laurette, here dressed up in an \u2018exotic\u2019 costume for the purposes of this painting. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-57830","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHenry Matisse Femme Espagnole - Centro Botin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.centrobotin.org\/en\/henry-matisse-femme-espagnole\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Henry Matisse Femme Espagnole - Centro Botin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Femme Espagnole, 1917. 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