259 - Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) The White Fox. 1929. Lithograph. 365 x 507 [498 x 647 mm]. Duthuit-Garnaud 514. A very fine print on white vellum, annotated “Essai” and signed in pencil. The stone impression is very pronounced at the top. A few fine creases from handling and slight signs of oxidation along the edges. On the reverse, a handwritten note in blue pencil: “Pl. 123.” Full margins. Final edition of 75 prints (in addition to 10 artist’s proofs). AABM stamp (Lugt 3075). The model posing here is Élise (Albertine Henriette) Löwengard-Clarnète, known as Lisette (1910–2001), whom Matisse also depicted in his lithographs from this period as a Persian woman or an odalisque. " [She] was only 18 years old when she met Matisse, for whom she posed from 1928 to September 1933. She occupies a particularly interesting place among his models, as she was an unwitting witness not only to an artistic crisis and the turmoil it entailed but also to the renewed creative vigor sparked in the painter by Albert Barnes’s commission for a large mural for the entrance hall of his foundation in Merion (near Philadelphia, USA). [She recalls:] “Matisse fell head over heels for those dresses, in which he took obvious pleasure not only in painting me but also in photographing me; he had become enamored of them and made them his own. That seemed to me to be the natural order of things [...]. Matisse combined the jealousy of a lovesick sultan with the generosity of a prince. He treated me with the consideration of a father and the temper of a tiger. In 1989, in an article published in *Madame Figaro*, Lisette recounted the years she spent with Matisse. She described, for example, her role during the creation of *La Danse* for the Barnes Foundation: “After posing nude, I would put on my smock and climb onto the huge platform on wheels to pin the drawing to the wall. I would move it to the right or to the left, as he instructed. He would ask for my opinion.” This detail confirms the multiple roles that some models sometimes took on in the Matisse household. She also served as a nurse to the artist’s wife. In one of the many drawings he liked to include with his letters, Matisse humorously sketches her as she tends to his wife, and elsewhere he mentions the benefits of the massages she gave him to relieve a case of neuritis in his arm. An almost familial intimacy characterized her relationship with the painter and his wife. [...] The regular correspondence Matisse maintained with his wife Amélie during his trip to the United States and Tahiti in 1930 attests to his obsession with Lisette’s physical form and slenderness... [...] From traditionally composed engravings a few centimeters long to the three panels of *La Danse*, each measuring more than three meters by four, Lisette’s protean body runs through the works of the early 1930s and accompanies the evolution of the painter’s practice over three decisive years.” (Matisse Museum, Nice).