“Rodin apart, it could be said that the most significant contributions to the evolution of modern sculpture before the advent of cubism were made by two painters – Degas and Matisse.”
—Herbert Read

With its confident, serpentine sense of line and remarkably plastic treatment of form, Henri Matisse’s Grand Nu accroupi (Olga) is a powerful example of the painter’s skill and strength as a sculptor, a medium which allowed him to grapple with both tradition and innovation as he continued to push his practice in new directions. First modelled in 1909-1910, and later cast in an edition of ten in 1952, the present work evolved from an earlier series of smaller sculptural pieces that Matisse had started working on in 1908, including Petit nu accoupi avec bras and Nu accroupi, a version of which is now held in the Musée Matisse in Nice. During this most radical and revolutionary phase of the artist’s career, he alternated between painting and sculpture as a way of exploring ‘problems of form and movement which he found difficult to solve in the two-dimensional medium of painting.’ⁱ

 

 

Matisse, Sculpture, and the Body

 

More complex and sensitively rendered than the earlier sculptural works, Grand Nu accroupi (Olga) highlights the central role of the body in Matisse’s sculptural experiments, and the ways in which this would go on to inform the treatment of form and space in his painting after this point. Importantly, as the curators of the 2007 exhibition Matisse: Painter as Sculptor stressed, before 1908, ‘Matisse had almost exclusively represented the human form either standing or reclining’, radically adapting this stance with the commencement of this sequence of works featuring a seated or crouched female nude, her knees and arms bent and held in a more dramatic, cantilevered tension.ⁱⁱ In this more dynamic arrangement, Matisse was able to more fully explore the interplay of rhythm and movement, the exaggerated twist of the spine endowing the figure with a profoundly muscular and vital energy.

 

Working on a larger scale than he had with the earlier, hand-held works Matisse was also able to correct ‘the development that caused the first series of crouching torsos to fold progressively in on themselves.’ The remarkable openness of the figure here not only introduces new and more complex contortions into the artist’s repertoire - allowing him to escape the limitations of mass and volume in favour of a flowing, arabesque line - but lays essential foundations for the elasticity that he would achieve in his later sculptural nudes. It is in Grand Nu accroupi (Olga) especially that we find evidence of Matisse’s guidance to his students that ‘arms are like rolls of clay, but forearms are also like ropes because torsion can be placed on them.’ⁱⁱⁱ Importantly, while the earlier, smaller pieces were modelled from photographs, employing a much vaguer treatment of the face, head, and other distinguishing features, Grand Nu accroupi (Olga) was modelled from life, the Russian artist Olga Markusovna Meerson ‘the only woman reckless enough to pose nude for Matisse in the years before the First World War.’^vi

 

Artist and Model

“[Olga Meerson] is purely an artist, and could never live at peace except through her art.”
—Henri Matisse

A young, ambitious, and prodigiously talented art student nicknamed ‘Mlle Russia’ by Gertrude Stein, Olga Meerson first met Matisse in 1908, the same year that she presented a selection of bold and confidently executed paintings at the official Paris Salon.^v Of Russian Jewish ancestry, Meerson was described as a striking beauty with thick auburn hair and an indomitable personality. Having been a member of Wassily Kandinsky’s Phalanx Class alongside artists such as Gabriele Münter, Meerson travelled to France, arriving in Paris in time to witness firsthand the scandalised reactions to the infamous first presentation of Fauve paintings at the 1905 Salon des Indépendents.

 

Convincing the older master of her commitment to innovative modern modes of painting, she veered away from the more predictable path of society portraiture and academic painting that had been open to her, taking up a position as his pupil the same year. Hans Purrmann described the rigmarole of these classes, where Matisse ‘would strip each work down to its bare essence, examine what was left for any trace of individual expression, and then devote himself to clarifying and strengthening this residuum.’^vi Despite the emotional intensity of these sessions and her own nagging sense of self-doubt, Meerson’s painting seemed to thrive during this period, producing some of the most remarkable and shocking works presented in the 1911 Salon des Indépendents as her style became more immediate and expressive, whilst retaining the early facility for colour, composition, and pattern that had first caught Matisse’s attention. A particular champion of her portraiture, Matisse underscored Meerson’s ‘ability to catch a likeness, a rich feeling for colour and a generous sense of design’ - qualities clearly demonstrated in her 1911 portrait of the older painter.^vii Matisse was famously reluctant to sit for his own portrait, and yet here she captures him in a disarmingly intimate and unguarded manner, stretched out across a chequered textile ground, his head propped on his hand as he reads the book rested in front of him.
 

 

Close to both Matisse and his wife, Meerson was a frequent visitor to his home and studio at Issy-Les-Moulineaux during this time, even holidaying with the couple at Collioure in the summer of 1911. During this period of intense creative exchange, both artists painted portraits of each other, Matisse’s Olga Meerson, now held in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston a particularly striking record of this fruitful period. Although the precise nature of their relationship remains ambiguous, the intensity of her feelings for Matisse seems clear; the summer was not only productive and happy, but proved to be decisive for both, with Matisse going on to paint some of his most iconic early works during this period, including his suite of Studio paintings which proudly feature some of the sculptural pieces that were preoccupying the artist during this time.

 

As Matisse’s biographer, Hilary Spurling has described, Meerson ‘personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models’, qualities that reverberate across both the painted portrait and the present work.^viii However, while both present the sitter with clarity and a powerful sense of self-possession, the rigidity of Meerson’s pose in the portrait - carriage erect, long neck extended and her hands clasped firmly in her lap – gives way to a much more fluid and relaxed sense of line and sensual corporeality in Grand Nu accroupi (Olga). This more languid and sensual treatment of the body would go on to inform Matisse's treatment of the nude going forward, reappearing in his late, great innovation of the paper cutouts in the crouched pose of his iconic Nu bleu series, tellingly embarked on in the early years of the 1950s, just as the artist returned to these earlier sculptural experiments to arrange their casting. Restlessly inventive, Matisse turned to the body and sculptural representation to further his most radical experiments in the treatment of form, as much in the early stages of his career as at its very end, giving weight to his assertion that ‘All things have their decided physical character […] In addition to the sensations one derives from a drawing, 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. The smaller the bit of sculpture, the more the essentials of form must exist.’^ix

 

Collector’s Digest

• An undisputed Master of Modern Art, Henri Matisse is best known for his paintings and works on paper, including his celebrated cutouts which formed the basis of a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern in 2014. Turning to sculpture to explore problems relating to form and movement, Matisse’s works in this medium are of supreme importance, not only in relation to his oeuvre, but to development of modern art itself.

• The present work is one of a numbered edition of 10, with other examples now held in some of the most prestigious institutional and private collections worldwide, with one example held in the Kunsthaus Zurich. Versions of Grand Nu accroupi (Olga) have been included in major Matisse exhibitions internationally.

 

 

ⁱ Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History, London, 1964, p. 31.

ⁱⁱ Heather MacDonald, Jed Morse, Oliver Shell, 'Seated and Crouching Nudes', in Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2007,  p. 180.

ⁱⁱⁱ Henri Matisse, quoted in Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History, London, 1964, p. 42. 

^iv Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2006, p. 75.

^v Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2006, p. 16.

^vi Hans Purrmann, quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2206, p. 23.

^vii Henri Matisse, quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2006, p. 16.

^viii Henri Matisse, quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2006, p. 19.

^ix Henri Matisse Lecture, recorded by Sarah Stein and quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909-1954, London, 2006, p. 42.