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.
Gallery label from Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917, July 18–October 11, 2010.
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.
Gallery label from 2011.
