Around 1920, Henri Matisse entered a parallel and complementary phase to his most celebrated paintings. Fully immersed in his so-called Niçoise years—a fertile period stretching from 1917 to 1929—he developed, alongside his luxuriant compositions of colorful interiors and oriental motifs, a more introspective and silent graphic practice. This was not a renunciation of chromatic brilliance, but rather a purer facet of his approach, focused on the essential line, the economy of gesture, and formal clarity. This tension between pictorial opulence and linear rigor runs through the entire period, giving his oeuvre a depth often overlooked by the general public.
The lithographs of female figures from these years—such as the one from 1925 before us—reflect this quest for structural clarity. The models, seated or depicted frontally, with crossed or folded arms, appear in deliberate, almost hieratic poses. Color recedes, yet intensity remains, transposed into the balance of the line and the meditative density of the pose. These works on paper are not preparatory sketches, but fully realized creations, published in collaboration with the finest printers of the time and issued in limited, signed, and numbered editions.
This more restrained yet equally radical aspect of Matisse’s work reveals another logic within his art: that of condensation. As the gesture simplifies, presence deepens. These are works of mastery, not of effect—anticipating, in their quiet authority, the lyrical abstraction and minimalism that would follow. In this sense, they do not turn away from the Mediterranean brilliance that surrounds him in Nice, but rather absorb it into a plastic economy where each line holds the force of a color, and each silence the rhythm of a movement.
