Nu à la serviette blanche, circa 1901-1903
Oil on canvas
At various stages in his early career Matisse experimented with pictorial elements that would eventually coalesce into the Fauve manner of 1905, those canvases that instigated the first modernist furor of the new century when they were shown at the Salon d'Automne that year. The Corsican landscapes of 1898, and certain still-lifes and exploratory figure paintings executed at the turn of the century contain unmistakable signs of later developments. Few canvases, however, are so proto-Fauve–and none so strikingly prescient–as Nu à la serviette blanche. Standing out from other works of the years 1902-1903, this canvas clearly foreshadows the revolutionary Fauve canvases that followed a couple of years later–indeed, it makes them seem virtually inevitable.
This painting is all the more remarkable because in 1902-1903 Matisse overcame an almost ruinous string of adversities in his private life. Jack Flam has called this early period the "years of struggle" (op. cit., 1986, p. 78), while Alfred H. Barr, Jr. singled out 1902-1903 as Matisse's "dark years" (Matisse: His Art and his Public, New York, 1951, p. 50), in reference to the somber tonalities that he adopted in most of his paintings during this time, in an effort to make them more attractive to buyers and the Salon jury. With the publication of Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse (New York, 1998), we now have a more thorough understanding of the personal and family difficulties that confronted the artist during this period, and how he overcame them through a resolute and unyielding commitment to his art.
In May 1902 the Humbert scandal broke, dominating the headlines then much as the Madoff swindle did in late 2008. Frédéric and Thérèse Humbert had for years leveraged their extensive business dealings against a non-existent legacy, and fled Paris only hours before their fraudulent scheme was uncovered, costing some 11,000 investors their life savings. Armand and Catherine Parayre, the parents of Matisse's wife Amélie, both worked for the Humberts and were implicated in the scandal. When the Humberts were finally detained that December in Madrid, Armand Parayre, then 60 years old, was also arrested and imprisoned for more than a month. Amélie's health suffered and she was forced to close her millinery business, from which the artist's family derived their sole income.
Matisse took on the role of family spokesman and defender. To escape the poisonous atmosphere in Paris, the artist and his family spent the winter of 1902-1903 at the home of his parents in Bohain-en-Vermandois. The situation was no better when they returned to Paris, and in March 1903 Matisse closed his Paris studio at 19, quai de Saint-Michel and returned to Bohain. "The spring of 1903 marked his low point,” Spurling has written. “He wrote to Marquet in March, vividly describing the state of misery and emotional numbness to which insomnia had reduced him, and which he feared might end in total disintegration" (op. cit., 1998, p. 250).
Later that spring Matisse moved to another house in Bohain to escape his parents, who had long complained of his choice of a career and his inability to provide properly for his family. The artist depicted his new studio in L'atelier sous les toits. "Dark" it was–Barr described it "as original in conception as it is disconsolate in atmosphere" (op. cit., 1951, p. 50). In July 1903 Matisse and his family moved to Lesquielles-Saint Germain, some distance away. "My work more or less satisfies me,” he wrote to fellow painter Simon Bussy on 15 July, suggesting that the worst was over. “I am aware of continual real progress, more suppleness of execution than in the earlier studies, and a return to the soft harmonies and close values that will certainly be better received by collectors... The various cares, small and large, more small than large, which life has already given me a good share of, and the responsibility that I've decided courageously to accept, combined with the pittance that our calling brings in, had almost made me decide to quit painting altogether" (quoted in J. Flam, op. cit., 1986, p. 82).
In mid-August 1903 the Humberts were tried and convicted in Paris. The Parayres were found to have been unwitting and blameless instruments in the Humbert scam. Amélie’s health was slowly improving, and with the hope of re-opening her business and working again in his Paris studio, Matisse returned to the capital in the fall of 1903, accompanied by Marguerite, his eldest child.
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