H enri Matisse’s drawings from the 1920s exhibit a breathtaking ingenuity and highlight his fascination with the reclining nude, a prevalent motif in his oeuvre. For Matisse, line drawing was the “purest and most direct translation” of his emotion, since “the simplification of the medium allows that” (quoted in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 130). The interplay of white space and the spontaneous character of line was one that preoccupied Matisse greatly. In Femme allongée, Matisse applies this technique, creating a sense of volume with his nude model: he balances the bold and emphatic contours of her body with playful decorative elements that fill the space around her. As in many of his odalisque works, Matisse uses model Henriette Darricarrére in Femme allongée. Studying her pose, one can sense a comfortable attitude, a studied consistency well-versed by her memory of past sessions and exploration of the figurative pose. Matisse describes the role of his models in relation to his work, explaining that they were “never just ‘extra’ in an interior,” but a “principal them
e” in his practice. He states: “the emotional interest aroused in me by them does not appear particularly in the representation of their bodies, but often rather in the lines or special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper, which form its complete orchestration, its architecture" (quoted in John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, London, 1984, p. 177).