THE COLLECTION
Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal)
- Date:
- Paris, quai Saint-Michel, early 1914
- Medium:
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 57 7/8 x 37 5/8" (147 x 95.5 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Gift and bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx
- MoMA Number:
- 506.1964
- Copyright:
- © 2013 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
2011
Matisse took Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal) through many changes as he worked, particularly the seated figure. Perhaps the greatest alteration was in color: vivid blue, green, and orange-red areas have been mostly covered with layers of gray. The painting shares its simplified geometric forms, heavy contouring, and austere palette with the work of Paul Cézanne and the Cubist paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque made a few years earlier.
Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917
July 18–October 11, 2010
Matisse took Woman on a High Stool through many changes as he worked, particularly the seated figure. Perhaps the greatest alteration was in color: vivid blue, green, and orange-red areas have been mostly covered with layers of gray. Here, as in his earlier blue paintings, the artist may have embraced a restriction of color for the formal and expressive potential it presented. The painting shares its simplified geometric forms, heavy contouring, and austere palette with the work of Cézanne and Cubist paintings Picasso and Georges Braque made a few years earlier. This work represents Germaine Raynal, wife of the Cubist critic Maurice Raynal.
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