Henri Matisse

Estate of the artist

Heinz Berggruen, Paris (acquired by 1954)

The Hanover Gallery, London

Lillian Florsheim (née Hyman), Chicago (acquired by 1961)

Mary-Elizabeth Jones (née Florsheim), California (acquired by descent from the above)

Acquired from the above on 1 June 1989 by the present owner

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2020-25 (long term loan)

Christian Zervos, ed., “Sculptures des peintres d’aujourd’hui,” Cahiers d’art, 1928, p. 179, illustration of another cast

Pierre Courthion, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1934, pl. LVIII, illustration of another cast 

Ragnar Josephson and Erik Wettergren, eds., Expressionism, Stockholm, 1947, fig. 8, p. 15, illustration of the terracotta

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, pp. 94, 100, 140, 164, 205 and 217; p. 337, illustration of another cast (titled Reclining Nude, I (Nu couché, 1er état))

Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, Buffalo, 1952, pp. 16 and 24; p. 59, illustration of another cast

Clement Greenberg, Matisse, New York, 1953, pl. 32, illustration of another cast

Giulio Carlo Argan, “Matisse scultore,” Rivista trimestrale dell'Ente della Biennale, vol. 6, no. 26, December 1955, p. 33 

Gaston Diehl, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1958, pl. 4, p. 39, illustration of another cast; pp. 41 and 117 (dated 1928)

Raymond Escholier, Matisse: From the Life, London, 1960, p. 15

Giuseppe Marchiori, Modern French Sculpture, London, 1964, p. 14, pl. X, illustration of another cast; pl. XI, illustration in color of another cast (detail)

Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, New York, 1964, fig. 33, p. 31, illustration of another cast; p. 298

Jean Guichard-Meili, Matisse, Paris, 1967, fig. 160, pp. 166 and 250; p. 168, illustration of another cast 

Herbert Read, Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society, London, 1967, pp. 117-18 and 171; pl. 30, illustration of another cast

Hjorvadur Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, 1968, fig. 155; pp. 103 and 114-15; p. 104, illustration of another cast

Robert Goldwater, What is Modern Sculpture?, Greenwich, 1969, p. 18, illustration of another cast; pp. 19 and 144

Henry Grosinsky, “The Sculpture of Matisse,” Life, vol. 69, no. 11, 11 September 1970, p. 42, illustration in color of the terracotta; p. 43 

Mario Luzi and Massimo Carrà, L’Opera di Matisse dalla rivolta ‘fauve’ all'intimismo 1904-1928, Milan, 1971, no. S3, p. 108, illustration of another cast; p. 109

Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, pls. 89-91; pp. 71, 76, 93, 105, 153 and 157; pp. 73-75, illustrations of another cast

John Jacobus, Henri Matisse, New York, 1973, fig. 16, pp. 23, 25, 54 and 144; p. 24, illustration of another cast

William Tucker, Early Modern Sculpture, New York, 1974, fig. 84, pp. 92, 96, and 168; p. 91, illustration of another cast

Theodore Reff, “Matisse: Meditations on a Statuette and Goldfish,” Arts, vol. 51, no. 3, November 1976, fig. 9, p. 109 and 111; p. 112, illustration of another cast

John Elderfield, The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse, New York, 1978, p. 121, illustration of the plaster (in photograph of the artist’s studio)

Lawrence Gowing, Matisse, New York and Toronto, 1979, no. 52, p. 71, illustration of another cast; pp. 74-76 and 207

Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, ed., Matisse: oeuvres de Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, Paris, 1979, no. 51, pp. 15 and 147, illustrations of another cast; p. 146

Marcel Giry, Le Fauvisme: ses origines, son évolution, Neuchâtel, 1981, p. 188

Douglas Mannering,

The Art of Matisse, London and New York, 1982, p. 39

Pierre Schneider, Matisse, New York, 1984, pp. 330, 339, note 28, 348-50, 391-92, 394, 399, 416, note 32, 420, 431, 461, 489, 493, note, 80, 524, 536, 541, 544-45, 557, and 566-67; pp. 342 and 546, illustrations of another cast 

Nicolas Watkins, Matisse, New York, 1985, pl. 61, p. 81, illustration in color of another cast; p. 82, 111, 139, 165 and 234

Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918, Ithaca and London, 1986, fig. 187, pp. 191, 196, 279, 343, 452 and 491, notes 3-4 and 20-21; p. 192, illustration of another cast

Françoise Leroy, “Matisse tout entier,” Esprit, vol. 2, no. 111, February 1986, p. 27

Jacqueline Guillaud and Maurice Guillaud, Matisse: Rhythm and Line, Paris and New York, 1987, p. 313, illustration of another cast (in photograph of Claribel Cone and Etta Cone’s residence)

Jack Flam, ed., Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 65, illustration of another cast

Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Anne Baldassari and Claude Laugier, Matisse, Paris, 1989, no. 118, pp. 162, 318 and 320-21; p. 319, illustrations of another cast

Jean Selz, Matisse, New York, 1990, p. 29, illustration of the terracotta

Rosamond Bernier, Matisse, Picasso, Miró as I Knew Them, New York, 1991, p. 73, illustration of another cast (dated 1906-07) 

Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, pl. 113, illustration of another cast; p. 193 

James D. Herbert, Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, New Haven and London, 1992, fig. 83, p. 159, illustration of another cast

Sarah Wilson, Matisse, New York, 1992, pp. 14, 28 and 126; pl. 39, illustration of another cast

Xavier Girard, Matisse. Une splendeur inouïe, Paris, 1993, pp. 50-51, illustration in color of another cast 

Hayden Herrera, Matisse: A Portrait, New York, 1993, p. 68; p. 69, illustration of another cast (dated 1906-07)

Walter Guadagnini, Matisse, Milan, 1993, pp. 16, 107 and 262; p. 266, illustration of another cast

Guy Patrice Dauberville and Michel Dauberville, Matisse: Henri Matisse Chez Bernheim-Jeune, vol. II, Paris, 1995, no. 792, p. 1411, illustration of another cast (titled Femme couchée (nu couché))

Claude Duthuit and Wanda de Guébriant, Henri Matisse, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre sculpté, Paris, 1997, no. 30, pp. XVIII-IV, 74, 76 and 375-76; pp. 75 and 77, illustrations of another cast; p. 254, illustration of another cast (in photograph of the artist’s Paris residence)

Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Early Years 1869-1908, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998, p. 373, illustration of another cast; pp. 374 and 378 (dated 1906-07); p. 383, illustration of another cast (in photograph of the residence of Sarah and Michael Stein)

Pierre Daix, Picasso et Matisse revisités, Neuchâtel, 2002, p. 62 

Jack Flam,

Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship, New York, 2003, pp. 73, 81, 112 and 152

Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, La Pensée-Matisse: portrait de l'artiste en hyperfauve, Paris, 2005, vol. I, pp. 230, 236-37 and 239; vol. II, pl. 46, illustration of another cast

Rémi Labrusse and Jacqueline Munck, Matisse-Derain: La Vérité du Fauvisme, Paris, 2005, pp. 199, 277, 278 and 280; p. 282, illustration in color of another cast (dated 1906-07)

Oliver Berggruen and Max Hollein, eds., Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, Masterpieces from the Late Years, Munich, Berlin, London, et al., 2006, frontispiece, illustration of the plaster (in photograph of the artist’s studio)

Shirley Nielsen Blum, Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, New York, 2010, no. 36, p. 54 and 186; p. 57, illustration in color of another cast (dated 1906-07)

Pierre Courthion; Serge Guilbaut, ed., Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Los Angeles, 2013, pl. 11, pp. 86, 163 and 293, p. 162, illustration in color of another cast

Executed in 1907, Nu couché I (Aurore) stands among the most pivotal of Henri Matisse’s achievements in sculpture. Rendered with potent and lyrical expressive force, the present work represents one of the earliest iterations of the reclining nude subject that would become a central preoccupation for the artist in subsequent decades.

The motif of the recumbent female nude—a symbol of sensuality and eroticism since antiquity—first emerged in Matisse’s oeuvre as the luxuriant, nymphic figures populating his Fauve masterworks Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904 and Le Bonheur de vivre of 1905-06, serving as evocations of an Arcadian idyll (see figs. 1 and 2). As the radical investigations of liberated color that he had spearheaded as the leader of the Fauve movement gave way by the end of 1906 to an interest in volumetric representations of the human figure, Matisse sought to transpose the reclining forms of these paintings into three dimensions. “In the winter of 1906-07, working at Collioure,” notes John Elderfield, “Matisse finally put aside the excited mixed-technique style of Fauvism…Matisse returned to volumes as if to bring the test of sculptural reality the idealized linear rhythms he had been developing over the past year” (John Elderfield, Matisse in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1978, p. 50). Born from this period, Matisse’s Nu couché I would prove as iconoclastic to the tradition of sculpture as his Fauve works were that of painting.

While sculpture featured in Matisse’s early practice—with the execution of his first sculptures coinciding with his very first paintings—Nu couché I ushered in the most fervent and productive period of Matisse’s output in this discipline. The artist spent weeks subsumed in the execution of the present model; he even missed a series of trains for a scheduled visit to friend and fellow sculptor Aristide Maillol—himself a pioneer of the opulent, placid female nude—on account of being unable to pry himself away from his studio. Such zeal, however, would ultimately be met with forced disruption, fortuitously giving rise to one of the artist’s seminal paintings of the period. Matisse recounted over three decades later:

“One day I was working on her, full of enthusiasm, when the tray she was on slipped off the turntable; it flipped over— squashing my shaped clay underneath, of course. The sound of it falling and the shout I gave brought my wife rushing up from the room below; she found me still apoplectic… The next morning I picked up my work and managed to set things straight, at least straight enough to go on working on it. But before that, full of the confidence that it had brought me, I took a big canvas and painted [Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra].”

The artist quoted in Pierre Courthion; Serge Guilbaut, ed., Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Los Angeles, 2013, p. 86)

Nu bleu (Souvenir de Biskra) from 1907 (see fig. 3) marked the inception of Matisse’s focus on the reclining nude canvases that would later predominate his practice. The pose and anatomy of its central figure—its right elbow raised and legs crossed with dramatic torsion—mirrors almost identically that of the present bronze, articulated with a sculptural heft akin to the figuration of Matisse’s influential precursor, Paul Cézanne. Both works possess not only a formal synergy, but also a technical one: modeled with remarkable tactility through the application of thick, nearly claylike swathes of paint, Nu bleu departed strikingly from his prior painterly methods. Marking a turning point in the interrelationship of the artist’s painting and sculpture, this moment would herald Matisse’s longstanding interest in the reconciliation of separate artistic disciplines, culminating with the groundbreaking paper cut-outs of his final years. As the artist proclaimed, “I sculpted because what interested me in painting was a clarification of my ideas… Whatever I’d found in sculpture helped me with my painting. It was always in view of a complete possession of my mind, a sort of hierarchy of all sensations, that I kept working in the hope of finding an ultimate method” (quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), The Sculpture of Matisse, 1972, p. 1).

The recumbent form of Nu couché I finds its origins in the allegorical Hellenistic sculpture of the Sleeping Ariadne, further popularized in such Renaissance works as Michaelangelo’s Aurora of the Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici at the Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence (see fig. 4), an influence implied by the secondary title of the present work. Now working solely from his own imagination rather than a live model, Matisse was liberated to radically reconceive the human form itself. The anatomy of the figure is both distilled to its most elemental parts and expanded to the limits of its structural possibilities, embodying Matisse’s aim, shared with his greatest influence in sculpture, Auguste Rodin, not to mimetically reproduce human anatomy, but rather the internal emotional response it elicits. “[Nu couché I] is a more powerful statement than his painting of the content that they both embody,” Theodore Reff asserts, “…the energetic opposition of forces and contrasted axes, the dynamic movement of forms in and out of space, is carried still further, as in the thrust of the crossed thigh, the shape of the raised arm, and the tension of the head and neck. It was in this sculpted form that the figure most fully expressed Matisse’s ideal of the power and vitality of the natural, the sensual” (Theodore Reff, “Matisse: Meditations on a Statuette and Goldfish,” Arts, vol. 51, November 1976, p. 115).

Initiated after Matisse’s trip to northern Africa in early 1906, the present work is considered among the first manifestations of African art’s influence on Matisse. Just as these travels prompted his collection of ornamental textiles that would come to define his celebrated Nice period canvases, he also began to amass African sculptures, examples of which find affinity with the present work in their emphasis on expressive proportionality over mimetic rendering of the human form.

Declared by Jack Flam to be, “the most tactile piece of sculpture that he had done to date” (Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and his Art, 1869-1918, Ithaca, 1986, p. 191), Nu couché I possesses a superbly animated surface, exuding a vitality commensurate with that of the sculptural form itself. Akin to the palpably worked surfaces of Rodin’s sculptures, the present work bears evidence of the process of its creation: notches in the figure’s right wrist attest to the hewing and carving of his scalpel, just as trace mounds of clay on her rear right shoulder, added to reinforce the height of the extended arm, remain unsmoothed. Like Rodin, Matisse would preserve the casting seams of each bronze example to further underscore their materiality. A year later, Matisse would invoke these convictions in his treatise, Notes of a Painter: “A sculpture must invite us to handle it as an object; just so the sculptor must feel, in making it, the particular demands for volume and mass” (quoted in Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 23) (see fig. 5).

Nu couché I would also prove formative to Matisse's contemporary rival, Pablo Picasso. Upon seeing the volumetric form of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, Picasso adapted its reclining figure into his own preparatory works for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and other proto-Cubist compositions. Following the 1928 reproduction of Matisse’s sculptures in the prominent arts publication Cahiers d’Art as well as an exhibition of such works at the Galerie Pierre in Paris two years later, the influence of Matisse’s forms were again brought to bear on Picasso’s work. During the subsequent years, hailed as Picasso’s anni mirabiles, the artist produced at the Château de Boisgeloup a series of acclaimed recumbent sculptures and paintings of his clandestine lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, that, in their exaggerated sinuosity and biomorphic abstraction, are redolent of works like Nu couché I (see fig. 6).

Revealing the enduring importance of Nu couché I in his creative output, Matisse included depictions of its plaster cast in no fewer than nine oils over the following two decades (see above index). While Matisse regularly transposed his own three-dimensional works into his canvases as early as 1896—a device possibly adapted from his forerunners Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne—no other sculpture appears as frequently in his painted oeuvre as does the present work. In such early iterations as Les Poissons rouges, Sculpture et vase persan and Nature morte au pot d’étain, the form appears as a cipher for the human presence within the reduced scale of the still-life genre. Jacques Lassaigne elaborates regarding this incorporation of sculpture, “He seems to feel that, better than living models, they suggest rotundity and volume. It is as if he were seeking to integrate another dimension into the surface by means of artifacts which, having already been transposed from nature, had acquired a plasticity and substantiality of a superior order” (quoted in Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, p. 76). Each iteration depicts Nu couché I from a slightly different vantage point, thereby affirming the expressive power of the figure’s every angle, a fundamental principle of Matisse’s sculptural practice. Such depictions culminate with its enlarged, frontal depiction in the background garden of his groundbreaking 1917 canvas, La Leçon de musique, conjuring once more his pastoral Fauve landscapes.

The audacious explorations of the reclining nude motif first found in Nu couché I would persist for the remainder of Matisse’s career, coming into full force with the sumptuous odalisques of the artist’s famed 1917-30 Nice period and persisting in the architectonic physicality of his late figure paintings (see figs. 7 and 8). He would continue the reclining nude series in his final major sculptural grouping, Nu couché II and III of 1927-29, which maintain the first version’s concise rendering of the human forms but with a more circumscribed contrapposto.

Matisse’s reverence for the present work would endure until the very crowning years of his career, materializing in the sinuous forms of his seminal Nu bleus series of paper cut-outs; the artist compared this revolutionary technique his earlier sculpture, noting, “cutting directly in color reminds me of a sculptor’s carving in stone” (Henri Matisse, Jazz, 1947, pp. 3-4) (see fig. 9). Indeed, photographs reveal the plaster of Nu couché I present in his studio while this series was in progress, serving as an aide-mémoire of his lifelong pursuit of a harmonious feminine form (see fig. 10). Other examples of Nu couché I belong to preeminent institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. and the Buffalo Albright-Knox Gallery Art Museum.