The Large Nude

Matisse was never a full-fledged Cubist, but like other artists, he found inspiration in the art of Paul Cézanne and heeded his example especially closely around the time of his death in 1906. Cézanne advocated the reduction of forms into simple geometric solids: cubes, spheres, and cylinders. Here in one of his earliest lithographs, Matisse has suppressed the model’s facial features and extremities, and thus her individuality, turning his image into an ideal of femininity. Some scholars have recently challenged the date assigned to this work, linking it to Matisse’s reworking in 1913 of a painting of nude female bathers that he had begun in 1909. Either date is plausible, but neither has been verified.