Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 7 of 11

Dancer Resting by Henri Matisse, painted 1941. 

Matisse, like his friend and rival Picasso, broke with convention more than once during his long and prolific career. 

In 1905 he exhibited paintings whose colours were so out-there and loosely applied, that they really shocked audiences at the Salon d’Automne, the academy’s official Autumn art exhibition. 

Matisse and his cohort were labelled ‘The Fauves’ (the wild beasts) and they were the first avant garde artists of the twentieth century to really make their mark.  

In this portrait, painted some thirty-five years later, Matisse’s love of vivid colour is expressed in the green, blue and in the contrasting flesh of ‘the dancer’: his model, Lydia Delectorskaya. Lydia was Russian-born, educated, and had met Matisse when she was poor and in exile in France, finding work as a studio assistant and as a domestic help to his wife, at the age of 22. 

By 1940 Matisse’s wife Amélie divorced him after forty years of marriage, citing Lydia’s increasing role in his art studio. Then, as Germany invaded France, Matisse, aged seventy, was forced to flee Paris. Lydia went with him.

In Dancer Resting, the tension of Matisse’s situation isn’t evident. Instead, the model’s pose communicates ease and intimacy.  In fact, it’s startlingly sensuous, from the nude sketch on the easel behind her to the apricot-coloured splayed legs of his muse, framed by her emerald-green skirt. Matisse contrasts areas of flat colour, like the blue rug under the model’s feet, with organic shapes and decorative lines in the indoor plants that spill into the upper third of the picture. 

Matisse distils the information in the painting in his simplified outlines, Lydia’s legs and  foot are discreet shapes, anticipating the future direction of his art. 

Still in Nice in 1943, and bedbound after intestinal surgery, Matisse began to make paper cut-outs, which evolved into an illustrated book, published after the end of the war.  Matisse noted that using scissors to cut out pieces of coloured paper enabled him to reconcile the ‘eternal conflict of drawing and colour’. You can see one such work, The Nightmare of the White Elephant (Le cauchemar de l’éléphant blanc) in this gallery.  

Lydia Delectorskaya remained with Matisse in this final decade of his life, when he abandoned painting and paintbrushes in favour of paper and scissors. Experimenting and reinventing through to his last days.