Henri Matisse, (Aurora), 1906-7 cast c. 1930

• Key facts


  Size: 13 9/16 x 19 5/8 x 11 inches

  Medium: bronze

  Location: The Baltimore Museum of Art
• Henri Matisse, Reclining Nude I (Aurora), 1906-7 cast c. 1930
• She is a traditional odalisque from a North African harem, but, much like the Blue Nude painting that followed, Matisse’s surface treatment and distorted proportions moves us beyond her body as a sexual object, she was more than a reinvention of Classical Salon nudes
• Matisse was working on the plaster for this sculpture when he accidentally damaged the work and painted Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra as a two-dimensional substitute. A variation of her was later cast in bronze.
• Art historian Arnason describes the appeal of African figures on modern Western artists:


  "With their relatively large, mask-like heads, distended torsos, prominent sexual features, and squat, abbreviated, or elongated limbs, they impressed Matisse and his comrades with the powerful plasticity of their forms."
• When Green discussed Matisse’s painted Blue Nude he said the ‘animal vigour of his ‘African’ was blatantly sexual’.4 Presumably, the same could be said of his sculptural version.
• Influences


  In 1906 Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck began to collect art objects from Africa, which they had first seen in ethnographic exhibitions. Modern artists sought to appropriate these radical sources – they sought a primal energy which they believed non-western art could provide.
• Again, we can only assume he felt the same way about the formal treatment of his abstracted sculpture.


  Despite the well-established tradition of odalisques and voyeurism, Matisse’s abstraction arguably repels the voyeur; interesting that of his later version he said, ‘If I met such a woman in the street, I should run away in terror. Above all, I do not create a woman, I paint a picture’
• • The maker’s marks are visible in this sculpture and once again Matisse eschews the traditionally smooth surfaces that mimicked flesh in a way that the academy strived for.
  • She is modelled crudely and her anatomy is very different to what the public were used to
  • She has a pronounced and exaggerated musculature which is quite ‘masculine’ and abstracted. She is a ‘primitive’ woman.
• What his three-dimensional works do is challenge his label as hedonistic colourist above all, for in sculpture, colour holds no power but his engagement with his media and form holds court, as it always did.
• Exaggerated & elongated limbs and curvaceous quality