ITP 63: Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) by Henri Matisse
This week’s picture is Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) by Henri Matisse. Painted in 1935, the work was purchased the following year by Miss Etta Cone, one of two wealthy sisters whose collections were to form the nucleus of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Yesterday it went on display at the Royal Academy in London as part of “The Triumph of French Painting”, a loan exhibition from Baltimore which demonstrates just what formidable collectors the Cone sisters were. By the end of their lives they had, between them, amassed no fewer than 42 paintings, 18 sculptures, 36 drawings and 155 prints by Matisse.
For his part, the painter regarded the Cones as friends as well as patrons. He encouraged Etta to buy The Pink Nude, successfully tantalising her with various black-and-white photographs of the picture taken at different stages of its evolution. The work occupies an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, restating the theme of a sensual, languorous nude which preoccupied him for so much of his life; but it can also be read as an intriguing document of Matisse’s affection for one of the most fruitfully acquisitive American collectors of the twentieth century.
The Cone sisters - “Miss Etta and Dr Claribel”, as their friends called them - were lifelong spinsters who inherited considerable fortunes from their father, a wholesale grocer of German-Jewish descent. Dedicated connoisseurs, they travelled the world together visiting galleries and churches and acquiring en route a multitude of antiques, curios and works of art. They were introduced to Matisse in Paris by their friends and fellow Baltimoreans, Leo and Gertrude Stein.
“There were two of them, they were both women, they were sisters, they were together,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her characteristically mannered and oblique “word portrait” of the pair. “They were large women, they were rich, they were very different one from the other.” Claribel, six years older than Etta, was the more flamboyant. At a time when few American women went into higher education, she not only got into university but achieved academic distinction. Trained as a gynaecologist, she became Professor of Pathology at Baltimore Women’s Medical College and taught and lectured across Europe and America. Etta by contrast was relatively unassuming. She spent much of her life running the family home after her parents’ deaths and helping to care for the children of her brother, Moses, as he built the Cone grocery business into a financial empire.
Claribel explained her disinclination to marry by insisting that she lacked the patience to share her life with anyone else, while Etta said that she stayed single “because I never met anyone who was the equal of brother Moses”. Etta was being slightly disingenuous. The truth is that she was more attracted to women than men. Brenda Richardson, author of the memoir Dr Claribel and Miss Etta, indicates that she had a romantic affair with Gertrude Stein (Stein later compared Etta to Michelangelo’s female nude Night, in the Medici Chapel in Florence, which suggests that they were on intimate terms with each other). Published extracts from her letters and diaries reveal that she formed several other extremely close relationships with women during the course of her life, each of which she diplomatically concealed both from the more straitlaced members of her own family and from Baltimore society at large.
Claribel’s avant-garde art was seen by her contemporaries as a natural extension of her free-thinking, Bohemian, bluestocking public persona. But Etta’s collection appears to have been her only way of giving public expression to the more unconventional, imaginative and passionate aspects of her character.
Matisse seems to have understood very well just how much his pictures – generally of women alone in interiors - meant to her. He got into the habit of arranging little surprises for Etta when she came to see him on her annual trips to Europe. Just after she had bought a picture of his called The Yellow Dress, he invited her to his studio. On her arrival, she later recalled, “There sat the model in the yellow taffeta dress with the large yellow hat on, just in front of the window – the exact reproduction of my painting… Needless to say, I was thrilled.”
In the case of The Pink Nude, Matisse allowed Etta a different kind of intimate glimpse into the world of his paintings. By sending her a portfolio of photographs of the picture as a work-in-progress, he not only attempted to pique her interest but also let her in on his working processes. The photographs (which still survive) show how he had begun with a relatively naturalistic depiction of a woman reclining on a chaise longue, with a chair and a vase of flowers next to her. In completing the painting, he progressively flattened and abstracted the figure of his model, and simplified her environment. The vase with flowers became a flesh-coloured orb emitting a yellow cloud; the chair became a pair of diagrammatic, shell-like spirals.
Matisse explained such distortions as an attempt to universalise his subject matter:
“Supposing I want to paint the body of a woman: first of all I endow it with grace and charm, but I know that something more than that is necessary. I try to condense the meaning of this body by drawing its essential lines. The charm will then become less apparent at first glance, but in the long run it will begin to emanate from the new image. The image at the same time will be enriched by a wider meaning, a more comprehensively human one …”
What “meaning” might Matisse have intended to “condense” into the “essential lines” of the painting destined for the collection of Etta Cone? The pink nude bursting with life is a curving, arabesque invention, ripely suggestive of female sensuality. With her chic bob, she is a fertility goddess for the 1930s. Her chaise-longue has been contrived into a kind of trellis, which makes her seem irrepressible – an odalisque like a climbing rose, overgrowing a structure meant to contain her. Matisse described Etta herself as an imperious, stately presence – like “some ancient Queen of Israel”, he wrote – who seemed almost to pulsate with an intense, inner vitality. I wonder if he meant The Pink Nude not just to appeal to her, but also as a kind of tribute to her. It is certainly not a physical likeness of Etta Cone (she was an old lady when he painted it, having already outlived her sister Claribel by seven years); but it is, perhaps, a picture of her spirit.
Date: 01-07-2001
Owning Institution: The Baltimore Museum of Art
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
20th Century
This week’s picture is Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) by Henri Matisse. Painted in 1935, the work was purchased the following year by Miss Etta Cone, one of two wealthy sisters whose collections were to form the nucleus of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Yesterday it went on display at the Royal Academy in London as part of “The Triumph of French Painting”, a loan exhibition from Baltimore which demonstrates just what formidable collectors the Cone sisters were. By the end of their lives they had, between them, amassed no fewer than 42 paintings, 18 sculptures, 36 drawings and 155 prints by Matisse.For his part, the painter regarded the Cones as friends as well as patrons. He encouraged Etta to buy The Pink Nude, successfully tantalising her with various black-and-white photographs of the picture taken at different stages of its evolution. The work occupies an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, restating the theme of a sensual, languorous nude which preoccupied him for so much of his life; but it can also be read as an intriguing document of Matisse’s affection for one of the most fruitfully acquisitive American collectors of the twentieth century.
The Cone sisters - “Miss Etta and Dr Claribel”, as their friends called them - were lifelong spinsters who inherited considerable fortunes from their father, a wholesale grocer of German-Jewish descent. Dedicated connoisseurs, they travelled the world together visiting galleries and churches and acquiring en route a multitude of antiques, curios and works of art. They were introduced to Matisse in Paris by their friends and fellow Baltimoreans, Leo and Gertrude Stein.
“There were two of them, they were both women, they were sisters, they were together,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her characteristically mannered and oblique “word portrait” of the pair. “They were large women, they were rich, they were very different one from the other.” Claribel, six years older than Etta, was the more flamboyant. At a time when few American women went into higher education, she not only got into university but achieved academic distinction. Trained as a gynaecologist, she became Professor of Pathology at Baltimore Women’s Medical College and taught and lectured across Europe and America. Etta by contrast was relatively unassuming. She spent much of her life running the family home after her parents’ deaths and helping to care for the children of her brother, Moses, as he built the Cone grocery business into a financial empire.
Claribel explained her disinclination to marry by insisting that she lacked the patience to share her life with anyone else, while Etta said that she stayed single “because I never met anyone who was the equal of brother Moses”. Etta was being slightly disingenuous. The truth is that she was more attracted to women than men. Brenda Richardson, author of the memoir Dr Claribel and Miss Etta, indicates that she had a romantic affair with Gertrude Stein (Stein later compared Etta to Michelangelo’s female nude Night, in the Medici Chapel in Florence, which suggests that they were on intimate terms with each other). Published extracts from her letters and diaries reveal that she formed several other extremely close relationships with women during the course of her life, each of which she diplomatically concealed both from the more straitlaced members of her own family and from Baltimore society at large.
Claribel’s avant-garde art was seen by her contemporaries as a natural extension of her free-thinking, Bohemian, bluestocking public persona. But Etta’s collection appears to have been her only way of giving public expression to the more unconventional, imaginative and passionate aspects of her character.
Matisse seems to have understood very well just how much his pictures – generally of women alone in interiors - meant to her. He got into the habit of arranging little surprises for Etta when she came to see him on her annual trips to Europe. Just after she had bought a picture of his called The Yellow Dress, he invited her to his studio. On her arrival, she later recalled, “There sat the model in the yellow taffeta dress with the large yellow hat on, just in front of the window – the exact reproduction of my painting… Needless to say, I was thrilled.”
In the case of The Pink Nude, Matisse allowed Etta a different kind of intimate glimpse into the world of his paintings. By sending her a portfolio of photographs of the picture as a work-in-progress, he not only attempted to pique her interest but also let her in on his working processes. The photographs (which still survive) show how he had begun with a relatively naturalistic depiction of a woman reclining on a chaise longue, with a chair and a vase of flowers next to her. In completing the painting, he progressively flattened and abstracted the figure of his model, and simplified her environment. The vase with flowers became a flesh-coloured orb emitting a yellow cloud; the chair became a pair of diagrammatic, shell-like spirals.
Matisse explained such distortions as an attempt to universalise his subject matter:
“Supposing I want to paint the body of a woman: first of all I endow it with grace and charm, but I know that something more than that is necessary. I try to condense the meaning of this body by drawing its essential lines. The charm will then become less apparent at first glance, but in the long run it will begin to emanate from the new image. The image at the same time will be enriched by a wider meaning, a more comprehensively human one …”
What “meaning” might Matisse have intended to “condense” into the “essential lines” of the painting destined for the collection of Etta Cone? The pink nude bursting with life is a curving, arabesque invention, ripely suggestive of female sensuality. With her chic bob, she is a fertility goddess for the 1930s. Her chaise-longue has been contrived into a kind of trellis, which makes her seem irrepressible – an odalisque like a climbing rose, overgrowing a structure meant to contain her. Matisse described Etta herself as an imperious, stately presence – like “some ancient Queen of Israel”, he wrote – who seemed almost to pulsate with an intense, inner vitality. I wonder if he meant The Pink Nude not just to appeal to her, but also as a kind of tribute to her. It is certainly not a physical likeness of Etta Cone (she was an old lady when he painted it, having already outlived her sister Claribel by seven years); but it is, perhaps, a picture of her spirit.
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